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The Center for Water Resource Studies and the Bowling Green Community College of Western Kentucky University formed a partnership to address an anticipated Water & Wastewater Operator/Technician shortage over the next five to seven years. The Water and Wastewater Technician Training Institute (WTTI, pronounced "witty"), is a joint initiative with the employment sector (a number of water & wastewater utilities/municipalities/districts), state primacy agencies and technical assistance/trade associations to refine an industry needs driven curriculum that utilizes on-line course delivery to provide options for both traditional & nontraditional students. This partnership was presented at the 2008 ASEE annual conference. This paper will review the accomplishments and the lessons learned by this program over the first year of operation. The partnership has revitalized an existing Associates Degree program entitled "Water Utilities Management". The program requires sixty-seven (67) credit hours, including twenty-five (25) hours of General Education Requirements, twenty-one (21) hours of Business Technology Core courses, and (21) twenty-one hours of Operations Track courses. The Operations Track courses can be focused toward either Water or Wastewater Operations. The program is designed to be delivered entirely online, allowing students to pursue their degree with unparalleled flexibility. According to the U.S. Department of Education, in 2006-07, there were approximately 11,200 college-level programs that were designed to be completed totally through distance education; 66 percent of these programs were reported as degree programs and the remaining 34 percent were reported as certificate programs. Asynchronous internet-based technologies were cited as the most widely used technology for the instructional delivery of distance education courses; they were used to a large extent in 75 percent and to a moderate extent in 17 percent of the institutions that offered college-level credit-granting distance education courses. The WTTI courses are delivered through an open-source Course Management System (CMS) known as MOODLE (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment). The first Operations Track class, entitled Water Supply & Wastewater Control was offered/developed during the Fall semester 2008. This first course, as well as a second course entitled Water Distribution and Wastewater Collection Systems will be available during the Spring semester 2009. As courses are developed, approval is sought for Continuing Education/Contact Hours from Operator Certification Boards in the individual states. Academic content is being provided by core university faculty with support from adjunct faculty eligible staff. All instructors (academic and practitioner) involved in the program are undergoing collaborative professional development to ensure that they are receptive to the unique structure of the program. As a demonstrably functional framework is being put in place, the program is being extrapolated to address other regional policy, academic discipline and industrial sector issues beyond the initial Kentucky and Tennessee target area. University-offered Water and Wastewater Operator Certificate Programs are being developed to fast-track students into the industry and allow current operators to reach advanced certification levels at an accelerated pace. Partnering utilities and municipalities are developing internship and cooperative educational opportunities to ensure work-based experiences for students. Trade associations have committed to developing scholarship programs to lessen the financial burden for potential students. In addition, some individual utilities are offering tuition reimbursement for current employees who are pursuing academic degrees or certificate programs. Finally, an educational outreach program that integrates into high school science curricula is being developed. This program is aimed at recruiting young adults into the water and wastewater industry. © American So for Engineering Education, 2009.

We report on descriptive analyses of classroom observations of the instruction and classroom interactions that took place over four days of a high school pre-engineering class, Project Lead the Way, as participants engaged in project-based learning. Our objective was to study the enacted curriculum and determine how class time was apportioned, the extent to which time was distributed between developing technical skills and fostering conceptual understanding in engineering and mathematics, and the degree to which mathematics concepts were implicitly embedded within the engineering activities or made explicit for students, and therefore more supportive of transfer of learning. Our coding of the video data support the following three main descriptive results: (1) more of the instructor's time was spent on class management (non-instructional) tasks than on any other classroom activity, (2) a greater proportion of the total observed instruction time was devoted to skills rather than concepts, and (3) only a small fraction of instruction that linked math concepts to engineering coursework made those links explicit, while the large majority were implicitly embedded in the activities and the CAD software used in the class. Both positive and negative examples of explicit integration are provided to illustrate these events. We relate these results to prior research on the intended curriculum used to convey the idealized pre-engineering program, and discuss the implications these findings have for fostering deep learning of engineering concepts and supporting the transfer of knowledge to novel tasks and situations. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2009.

One of the features of foundation degrees (FDs) is the incorporation of work-based learning (WBL) into the curriculum. WBL is seen as an important part of vocational programmes and is described by Foundation Degrees Forward (FDF) as a potentially radical approach to connecting work with learning. The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), in its benchmark for FDs, stated that WBL is an integral part of FDs that enables learners to take appropriate roles in the workplace in order to learn and apply skills they have learned on the programme. This paper presents findings of a large evaluation study of the development and delivery of FDs at Kingston University in south-west London, UK. As part of this evaluation data were sought from FD course directors and from students about WBL in their particular programmes. Findings from the evaluation showed variation in course directors' and students' understanding of WBL with emphasis on ‘work-based’ and little emphasis on ‘learning’. As a result, a variety of diverse models of WBL are being used. The findings from this evaluative study are compared with the literature on models and definitions of WBL, as well as the literature on how students on vocational programmes learn. Conclusions are drawn about the use of WBL in vocationally-orientated programmes, the consequences of mixed understandings and interpretations of WBL, and a pedagogy of WBL is proposed. © 2009 The Vocational Aspect of Education Ltd.

Tangaza College in Kenya, Mekelle University in Ethiopia and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands are working together in a new format of teaching and learning, namely the so-called Intercultural Virtual Seminar. By means of virtual communication, e-mail, MSN, Skype, SMS and a common website for shared documents and forum discussions students from the three partner institutions work together on sociotechnical problems, taking into account differences of culture and context. Despite low connectivity to Africa and the need to overcome cultural misunderstandings the experience is tremendous and very motivating for all parties involved. The Intercultural Virtual Seminar is being embedded in an innovation system in which technological expertise mainly from Delft University of Technology (but in exchange with the other partners) and contextual demands mainly from Africa (but in exchange with ideas from the Netherlands) are explored, new technological devices, and social institutions, procedures, skills are developed which can find their way into vocational training and small businesses and NGOs. Such an innovation system functions as an incubator for technology transfer and exchange. Internships, master theses, common research by the staff and in cooperation with third parties can make a difference.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) under pedagogical conditions can play a vital role in the structure of modern school. Interactive Videoconferencing (IVC) is a significant tool at the disposal of teachers and students, so that they can design and implement collaborative Learning activities at a distance. The application of videoconferencing in schools is significantly increasing but there is an obvious lack in the pedagogical design of educational videoconferencing programs. Technology alone is not efficient enough and there is a demand for a holistic pedagogical framework and a practical guide for the development and implementation of collaborative learning environments at a distance via videoconferencing. This new book covers this need and supports schools, teachers and content providers to develop a variety of interactive educational programs through videoconferencing, aiming at the opening up of school to new learning, social and cultural environments. The pedagogical utilization of VC broadens the horizons in communication and collaboration in school classrooms worldwide, thus contributing greatly to the active participation of students in authentic environments of exploration and collaborative structure of knowledge and to the development of vital social skills. © 2009 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

students undertaking employment during term time is a growing phenomenon, and whilst there is an awareness that a large proportion of our undergraduates have part-time jobs, the type and extent of this work and the learning experiences gained is less clear. The purpose of this article is to outline research undertaken to determine the potential for students to gain academic credit for their learning from part-time, term-time work. This had involved an exploration of the incidence and the nature of this part-time work, the skills developed, learning derived and the students’ ability to reflect upon this learning. An exploratory approach was used, quantitative research providing the numerical data of the level of participation in term-time employment, with qualitative exploration to gain insight into the students’ ability to understand, articulate and reflect upon the learning that is taking place within work and gain an insight into participants’ ideas, views and motivations. The research provides substantial evidence of the engagement in part-time work and demonstrates a clear overview of the development of personal and social competencies along with key skills and job-specific knowledge. This has led to the validation and introduction of an intermediate-level Work Based Learning module within the University of Huddersfield Business School, available as an alternative to a current core module, and which was to be evaluated during the course of the academic year 2007/2008. © 2009, UCU.

This qualitative case study was designed to provide an understanding of the work experience of Chinese college students in South Korea. A growing number of Chinese students are coming to South Korea for college education, and their aspirations for better work materialize into work experiences in South Korean businesses. In-depth interviews were conducted with five Chinese students to investigate their learning experience at local workplaces. The Chinese students' work experience not only led them to a deeper understanding of local culture and language, but also gave them integral learning within an experiential, situated learning environment. © 2009 National Institute of Education, Singapore.

Experiential learning is learning by doing and participating in activities that result in hands on approach to the transfer of knowledge. Experiential learning can be defined as a process by which the learner creates meaning from direct experience. Experiential-learning has been around for ages. It was one the first methods of educational instruction. Modern day experiential-learning theory has been mostly attributed to the works of John Dewey and David A. Kolb, but there have been contributions to the field made as far back as the French philosopher Rousseau in the early 19th century. (Kraft,1995). There are students who do not have the opportunity to participate in an off-campus internship or cooperative program due to various reasons, but there is an alternative option for students to enroll in an experiential-learning opportunity by registering for a course with an experiential-learning centered approach. The purpose of this paper is to determine the educational impact of experiential learning on the attitude and the performance of students in an "International Business unit". The paper presents a teaching model based on experiential learning in the "International Business" unit at undergraduate level. Preliminary analysis of 92 student evaluations determined the efficacy of experiential learning. To evaluate the cognitive (whether they learned from the experiential activity) and affective (did they like participating in this activity) impact on student learning. To evaluate the impact of experiential learning on ones own life. © Common Ground, Meena Chavan, All Rights Reserved.

The relationship between placement and academic performance on accounting and finance degrees is significantly under-researched. This paper examines the relationship between a number of factors, including placement, and academic performance as measured by average marks. Readily available data on placement status, gender, and prior achievement for the academic years ended 2004, 2005, and 2006 for students reading for an accounting and finance degree were used. Linear regression models were constructed using two versions of the data- one with all students in it and the second with graduates only. Placement students perform significantly better than full-time students do and, in the Graduates model, the female placement students perform significantly better than their male counterparts do. Most recent prior academic performance is significant in all models whereas gender had no separate significant effect on performance in the second and final years of the degree. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research into placement. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.

Lifelong learning is a 'keystone' of educational policies (Faure, 1972) where the emphasis on learning shifts from teacher to learner. Higher Education (HE) institutions should be committed to developing lifelong learning, that is promoting learning that is flexible, diverse and relevant at different times, and in different places, and is pursued throughout life. Therefore the HE sector needs to develop effective strategies to encourage engagement in meaningful learning for diverse student populations. The use of e-portfolios, as a 'purposeful aggregation of digital items' (Sutherland & Powell, 2007), can meet the needs of the student community by encouraging reflection, the recording of experiences and achievements, and personal development planning (PDP). The use of e-portfolios also promotes inclusivity in learning as it provides students with the opportunity to articulate their aspirations and take the first steps along the pathway of lifelong learning. However, ensuring the uptake of opportunities within their learning is more complex than the students simply having access to the software. Therefore it is argued here that crucial to the effective uptake and engagement of the e-portfolio is embedding it purposefully within the curriculum. In order to investigate effective implementation of e-portfolios an explanatory case study on their use was carried out, initially focusing on 3 groups of students engaged in work-based learning and professional practice. The 3 groups had e-Portfolios embedded and assessed at different levels. Group 1 did not have the e-Portfolio embedded into their curriculum nor was the e-Portfolio assessed. Group 2 had the e-Portfolio embedded into the curriculum and formatively assessed. Group 3 also had the e-Portfolio embedded into the curriculum and were summatively assessed. Results suggest that the use of e-Portfolios needs to be integral to curriculum design in modules rather than used as an additional tool. In addition to this more user engagement was found in group 2 where the e-Portfolio was formatively assessed only. The implications of this case study are further discussed in terms of curriculum development.