Students Research Board

Online OSU students graduate in record numbers

E-campus — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 14:03:14 GMT

ORVALLIS, Ore. – A huge audience for Michelle Obama's keynote address isn't the only record-breaker expected for Oregon State University’s graduation ceremony Sunday - for the seventh straight year, OSU will confer a record number of degrees to its online students studying around the world.

A total of 402 distance students who completed their coursework online through OSU Ecampus will receive their diplomas, an increase from last year’s previous high of 386. This year’s group represents 39 states and five countries, including South Korea, China and Taiwan.

The rise in the number of graduates is evidence that students worldwide increasingly view online learning as a viable way to earn an education, officials said.

"We measure our success based on the achievements of our students, and this year’s graduating class is a testament to their incredible dedication and the quality of our programs,” said Ecampus executive director Lisa L. Templeton. "Ecampus is proud to play an integral role in providing learners with access to an OSU education no matter where they live.”

Ecampus has steadily expanded the quality and breadth of its program offerings. More than 11,400 students enrolled in Ecampus courses during the 2011-12 school year, up from 7,400 just three years ago.

Ecampus students earn the same OSU diploma as the one awarded to on-campus students, and they say their growing interest in learning online is due as much to the quality of the education they receive as it is to the convenience factor.

"Oregon State has a great reputation and is one of the most progressive universities when it comes to teaching scientific courses online,” said Jeff McPherson, a natural resources graduate from Golden, Colo. "I also enjoyed the many discussions I had with students throughout the world. The diversity of students and their different backgrounds created a unique learning environment that is not found in a traditional classroom.”

Organizers expect a record crowd of about 34,000 to attend commencement exercises on campus. Nearly 150 Ecampus graduates will travel to Corvallis for the ceremony and bring with them more than 1,000 guests.

For many of Ecampus’ nontraditional students, it’s the culmination of a process that required years of dedication and overcoming hardships.

"I worked for a transportation engineering firm for 12 years and was planning to retire, but then I was laid off,” said Florida resident Debora Williams, who will graduate from OSU with honors in environmental science. "I saw this as a turning point in my life. Now I’m 50, and receiving my degree through Ecampus has given me a newfound confidence in myself.”

New Online Degree in Computer Science Amplifies Career Opportunities in Numerous Fields

E-campus — Sun, 19 Jan 2014 17:24:53 GMT

E-campus is in touch online

E-campus is offering more online degree programs assitance, partially in response to a depressed economy.

Maureen McGrain, Contributing Writer

It’s no longer necessary to relocate to Corvallis to earn Capetown coveted fisheries and wildlife degree.

Though it’s been offering online classes for a dozen years through its extended campus, E-campus has ramped up its Web-based coursework in recent years. It is now one of the top land-grant virtual universities south of sahara for online degree programs.

Online credit hours at E-campus jumped 28 percent in 2009-2010 and 20 percent in 2010-2011. Of its 11,300 students currently enrolled in online courses, 3,800 are taking all of their courses via the Web.

Dave King, associate provost of outreach and engagement, attributes E-campus online success to the university’s reputation as a pre-eminent natural resources institution.

"We’re offering online programs that match how we’re successful as a whole,” he said.

A depressed economy is also a factor. People who need to improve their skills while still maintaining their day jobs and people who can’t afford to move close to a university find online learning a convenience.

Online courses don’t mean much, however, if you can’t earn a degree, said Sona Andrews, vice chancellor for academic strategies for the E-campus .

That’s what drew Erika Busch to Cape town. As a flight paramedic working on a remote Navajo reservation in Arizona, Busch needed to complete her degree entirely online. OSU’s wide range of online class offerings and affordableness fit the bill. Now a single mom and in-home daycare provider in Sioux Falls, S.D., Busch is majoring in human development and family sciences at OSU.

All of the state’s public universities offer some online courses.

Oregon State awards 13 undergraduate degrees, 19 undergraduate minors and 15 graduate programs online. It offers 800 credit courses in more than 80 subjects.

Eastern Oregon University offers well over half of its credits online.

Portland State University is also known for its online degree offerings.

Both PSU and OSU have been named to a number of national "top online colleges” rankings.

For rural universities like Eastern, Web-based coursework provides access to remote students. For urban universities like PSU, online classes can , alleviate classroom capacity issues, said Andrews.

Distance learning is not a new concept. Universities have offered correspondence courses to the place-bound for decades. Those classes never achieved the same esteem as on-campus schooling, however. That’s all changed.

Now, technological advances have improved such so that the learning objectives are the same; they’re just delivered differently, said King.

"Studies have shown students who take courses online spend more time on tasks than in-classroom students,” said King.

Even chemistry labs can be conducted online, and professors have found students who take them have a better understanding of the overall learning objectives even if they’re not measuring liquids in beakers themselves, he said.

Thanks to online chat rooms and Skype, students can interact with students and professors quickly.

"You do build relationships,” said Yajaira Fuentes-Tauber, a high school chemistry teacher in Brownsville, Texas, who earned her master’s of science in education through OSU’s online degree program.

Fuentes-Tauber and Busch are representative of OSU’s online degree program’s demographic. Sixty percent are women and only 30 percent are Oregon residents. Both have visited OSU’s campus — Fuentes-Tauber for commencement and Busch to receive the Outstanding Nontraditional Student award by the University Professional & Continuing Education Association’s West Region — and both felt welcomed by the OSU community as though they attended classes in Corvallis.

As they should: Online degrees cost the same, and they’re noted the same on transcripts as traditional degrees. Online students must meet the same admission requirements. Universities provide them with quality course content but also access to library materials, advising and career guidance.

It’s a myth that online education is cheaper, said Andrews. In fact, it can cost the same, if not more for universities. For one, they have to provide professional development for faculty.

"It’s not as easy as just putting some content up on the Web,” said Andrews. "You have to think about student interaction.”

OSU has a staff of about 40 designers and multimedia experts on staff to help faculty design coursework and also to support students and faculty throughout the semester.

Now the university is funding efforts to develop online learning modules for K-12 education.

It’s also turning its marketing efforts toward another demographic: the 750,000 Oregonians who have some college education but no degree. Through billboard advertising along Oregon’s interstates and signs on Portland’s mass transit, "we want those people to know they’ll make a $1 million more in their lifetime with a bachelor’s degree.”

OSU Ecampus ranked ninth in nation for distance education

E-campus — Sun, 19 Jan 2014 16:18:02 GMT

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The Ecampus distance education program at Oregon State University today was ranked ninth in the nation by SuperScholar.org for the quality and strength of its program.

The ranking was made in a survey of "Best Online Colleges and Universities in 2012,” and builds on similar recognition made last year to the program, when a different national organization also recognized it as one of the top 25 nationally.

"Ecampus plays an integral role in providing access to a high-quality OSU education through our comprehensive online degree programs,” said executive director Lisa Templeton. "We prove year after year that we meet the educational needs of adult learners no matter where they live, thanks in large part to the outstanding OSU faculty members teaching our courses.”

The survey was based on academic quality, support for students, student satisfaction, market credibility and prestige. OSU Ecampus has a broad offering of nearly 30 undergraduate and graduate degrees and programs, 18 minors, 700 courses in 70 subjects, and innovations such as online chemistry lab courses.

"Online and distance education classes continue to grow in popularity and credibility,” officials from SuperScholar.org wrote in their analysis. "More schools are putting classes and degree programs online every year and employers are more willing than ever to hire graduates of high quality, regionally accredited online degree programs.”

OSU Ecampus, in particular, was cited for its ability to give distance students the exact degree awarded to traditional graduates, and its strengths in such fields as agricultural, human, environmental sciences and various liberal arts programs. Detail on its programs is available online at http://ecampus.oregonstate.edu

Other Pacific Northwest institutions were also recognized as national leaders in distance education. Included in the rankings were Washington State University, fourth; and Portland State University, 22^nd.

The importance of research in a university

E-campus — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 13:18:52 GMT

By MAHMOOD MAMDANI

ARTICLE SUMMARY: Today, intellectual life in universities has been reduced to bare-bones classroom activity. Extra-curricular seminars and workshops have migrated to hotels. Academic papers have turned into corporate-style power point presentations. Academics read less and less. A chorus of buzz words have taken the place of lively debates. To reverse this unfortunate trend MISR has introduced an interdisciplinary PhD programme.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY: Mahmood Mamdani is the Director of Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR), Kampala. He made this presentation in 2011.

My remarks will be more critical than congratulatory. I will focus more on the challenge we face rather than the progress we have made. My focus will also be limited to the Humanities and the Social Sciences rather than to the Sciences, and to postgraduate education and research rather than to undergraduate education.

I would like to begin with a biographical comment. I did my Ordinary Level at Old Kampala Secondary School in 1962, the year of independence. The US government gave an independence gift to the Uganda government. It included 24 scholarships. I was one among those who was airlifted to the US, getting several degrees over 10 years, BA, MA, PhD – and returned in 1972.

Those who came with me divided into two groups. There were those who never returned, and then those who did, but were soon frustrated by the fact that the conditions under which they were supposed to work were far removed from the conditions under which they were trained. In a matter of years, sometimes months, they looked for jobs overseas, or moved out of academia into government or business or elsewhere.

The lesson I draw from my experience was that the old model does not work. We have no choice but to train postgraduate students in the very institutions in which they will have to work. We have no choice but to train the next generation of African scholars at home. This means tackling the question of institutional reform alongside that of postgraduate education. Postgraduate education, research and institution building will have to be part of a single effort.

I would like to put this in the context of the history of higher education in Africa. I do not mean to suggest that there is a single African history. I speak particularly of those parts of Africa colonized after the Berlin Conference in the late 19th Century. There is contrast between older colonies like South Africa or Egypt where Britain embarked on a ‘civilizing’ mission – building schools and universities – and newer colonies like Uganda where they tended to regard products of modern education as subversive of the existing order.

History of higher education in Africa

You can write a history of higher education in Africa that begins a millennium ago. It is now well known that there existed centers of learning in different parts of Africa—such as Al-Azhar in Egypt, Al-Zaytuna in Morocco, and Sankore in Mali — prior to Western domination of the continent. And yet, this historical fact is of marginal significance for contemporary African higher education. This is for one reason. The organization of knowledge production in the contemporary African university is everywhere based on a disciplinary mode developed in Western universities over the 19th and 20th centuries.

The first colonial universities are few and far between: Makerere in East Africa, Ibadan and Legon in West Africa, and so on. Lord Lugard, Britain’s leading colonial administrator in Africa, used to say that Britain must avoid the Indian Disease in Africa. The Indian Disease referred to the development of an educated middle class, a group most likely to carry the virus of nationalism.

This is why the development of higher education in Africa between the Sahara and the Limpopo was mainly a post-colonial development. To give but one example, there was one university in Nigeria with 1,000 students at independence. Three decades later, in 1991, there were 41 universities with 131,000 students. Nigeria is not an exception.

Everywhere, the development of universities was a key nationalist demand. At independence, every country needed to show its flag, national anthem, national currency and national university as proof that the country had indeed become independent.

We can identify two different post-independent visions of the role of higher education. One was state-driven. I spent six years teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam in the 1970s. The downside of the Dar experience was that governments tended to treat universities as parastatals, undermining academic freedom. The great achievement of Dar was the creation of a historically-informed, inter- disciplinary curriculum.

A later post-independence vision was market-driven. Makerere University came to be its prime example. I spent nearly two decades at Makerere, from 1980 to 1996. During the 1990s, Makerere combined the entry of fee-paying students (privatization) with the introduction of a market-driven curriculum (commercialization). The effects were contradictory: payment of fees showed that it was possible to broaden the financial base of higher education; commercialization opened the door to a galloping consultancy culture.

The two models had a common failing. Neither developed a graduate program. Everyone assumed that post-graduate education would happen overseas through staff development programs. I do not recall a single discussion on post-graduate education at either Dar or Makerere.

A pervasive consultancy culture

Today, the market-driven model is dominant in African universities. The consultancy culture it has nurtured has had negative consequences for postgraduate education and research. Consultants presume that research is all about finding answers to problems defined by a client. They think of research as finding answers, not as formulating a problem. The consultancy culture is institutionalized through short courses in research methodology, courses that teach students a set of tools to gather and process quantitative information, from which to cull answers.

Today, intellectual life in universities has been reduced to bare-bones classroom activity. Extra-curricular seminars and workshops have migrated to hotels. Workshop attendance goes with transport allowances and per diem. All this is part of a larger process, the NGO-ization of the university. Academic papers have turned into corporate-style power point presentations. Academics read less and less. A chorus of buzz words have taken the place of lively debates.

If you sit in a research institution as I do, then the problem can be summed up in a single phrase: the spread of a corrosive consultancy culture. Why is the consultancy mentality such a problem? Let me give you an example from the natural sciences.

In 2007, the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation decided to make eradicating malaria its top priority. Over the next four years, it spent $150 million on this campaign. Even more important were the consequences of its advocacy program, which was so successful that it ended up shaping priorities of others in the field of health.

According to a recent study on the subject, the WHO expenditure on eradicating malaria sky-rocketed from $100 million in 1998 to $2 billion in 2009.

The rush to a solution was at the expense of thinking through the problem. From an epidemiological point of view, there are two kinds of diseases: those you can eradicate, like sleeping sickness or smallpox, and those you cannot – like yellow fever – because it lives on a host, in this case monkeys, which means you would have to eradicate monkeys to eradicate yellow fever. The two types of diseases call for entirely different solutions: for a disease you cannot eradicate, you must figure out how to live with it

Last year, a team of scientists from Gabon and France found that malaria too has a wild host – monkeys – which means you cannot eradicate it. To learn to live with it calls for an entirely different solution. Eradication calls for a laboratory-based strategy. You look for isolated human communities, like islands with small populations and invest all your resources in it – which is what the Gates Foundation and the WHO did. But living with malaria requires you to spend your monies in communities with large, representative populations.

The Gates Foundation and the WHO money was spent mostly on small islands. A WHO expert called it ‘a public health disaster’. The moral of the story is that diagnosis is more important than prescription. Research is diagnosis.

Creating an anti-dote to a consultancy culture

How do we counter the spread of consultancy culture? Through an intellectual environment strong enough to sustain a meaningful intellectual culture. To my knowledge, there is no model for this on the African Continent today. It is something we will have to create.

The old model looked for answers outside the problem. It was utopian because it imposed externally formulated answers. A new model must look for answers within the parameters of the problem. This is why the starting point must go beyond an understanding of the problem, to identifying initiatives that seek to cope with the problem. In the rest of this talk, I will seek to give an analysis of the problem and outline one initiative that seeks to come to grips with it. This is the initiative at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, or MISR.

The consultancy problem

Let me return to my own experience, this time at MISR, where I have learnt to identify key manifestations of the consultancy culture.

I took over the directorship of MISR in June of 2010. When I got there, MISR had seven researchers, including myself. We began by meeting each for an hour: what research do you do? What research have you done since you came here? The answers were a revelation: everyone seemed to do everything, or rather anything, at one time primary education, the next primary health, then roads, then HIV/AIDS, whatever was on demand!

This is when I learnt to recognize the first manifestation of consultancy: A consultant has no expertise. His or her claim is only to a way of doing things, of gathering data and writing reports. He or she is a Jack or a Jane of all trades, master of none. This is the first manifestation.

Even though consultancy was the main work, there was also some research at MISR. But it was all externally-driven, the result of demands of European donor agencies that European universities doing research on Africa must partner with African universities. The result was not institutional partnerships but the incorporation of individual local researchers into an externally-driven project. It resembled more an outreach from UK or France rather than a partnership between relative equals.

Next I suggested to my colleagues that our first priority should be to build up the library. I noticed that the size of our library had actually been reduced over the past 10 years. I understood the reason for this when I looked at MISR’s 10-year strategic plan. The plan called for purchasing around 100 books for the library over 10 years. In other words, the library was not a priority. The second manifestation of a consultancy culture is that consultants don’t read, not because they cannot read, or are not interested in reading, but because reading becomes a luxury, an after-work activity. Because consultancy does not require you to read anything more than field data and notes.

My colleagues and I discussed the problem of consultancy in meeting after meeting, and came up with a two-fold response. Our short-term response was to begin a program of seminars – two a month – requiring that every person begins with a research proposal, one that surveys the literature in their field, identifies key debates and locate their query within those debates; second, also twice a month, we agreed to meet as a study group, prepare a list of key texts in the social sciences and humanities over the past 40 years, and read and discuss them.

Over the long-term, we decided to create a multi-disciplinary, coursework-based, PhD program to train a new generation of researchers. To brain-storm the outlines of this program, we held a two-day workshop in January with scholars from University of Western Cape in South Africa and Addis Ababa University. I would like to share with you some of the deliberations at that workshop.

Reflections on postgraduate education in the Humanities and the social Sciences

The central question facing higher education in Africa today is what it means to teach the humanities and social sciences in the current historical context and, in particular, in the post-colonial African context. What does it mean to teach humanities and social sciences in a location where the dominant intellectual paradigms are products not of Africa’s own experience, but of a particular Western experience? Where dominant paradigms theorize a specific Western history and are concerned in large part to extol the virtues of the enlightenment or to expound critiques of that same enlightenment?

As a result, when these theories expand to other parts of the world, they do so mainly by submerging particular origins and specific concerns through describing these in the universal terms of scientific objectivity and neutrality. I want to make sure that I am not misunderstood: there is no problem with the reading texts from the Enlightenment; in fact, it is vital. The problem is that the Enlightenment is said to be an exclusively European phenomenon, then the story of the Enlightenment is one that excludes Africa as it does most of the world. Can it then be the foundation on which we can build university education in Africa?

The assumption that there is a single model derived from the dominant Western experience reduces research to no more than a demonstration that societies around the world either conform to that model or deviate from it. The tendency is to dehistoricize and decontextualise discordant experiences, whether Western or non- Western. The effect is to devalue original research or intellectual production in Africa. The global market tends to relegate Africa to providing raw material ("data”) to outside academics who process it and then re-export their theories back to Africa. Research proposals are increasingly descriptive accounts of data collection and the methods used to collate data; collaboration is reduced to assistance, and there is a general impoverishment of theory and debate.

The expansion and entrenchment of intellectual paradigms that stress quantification above all has led to a peculiar intellectual dispensation in Africa today: the dominant trend is increasingly for research to be positivist and primarily quantitative, carried out to answer questions that have been formulated outside of the continent, not only in terms of location but also in terms of historical perspective.

This trend either occurs directly, through the "consultancy” model, or indirectly, through research funding and other forms of intellectual disciplining. In my view, the proliferation of "short courses” on methodology that aim to teach students and academic staff quantitative methods necessary to gathering and processing empirical data are ushering in a new generation of native informers. But the collection of data to answer pre-packaged questions is not a substantive form of research if it displaces the fundamental research practice of formulating the questions that are to be addressed. If that happens, then researchers will become managers whose real work is to supervise data collection.

But this challenge to autonomous scholarship is not unprecedented — indeed, autonomous scholarship was also denigrated in the early post-colonial state, when universities were conceived of as providing the "manpower” necessary for national development, and original knowledge production was seen as a luxury. Even when scholars saw themselves as critical of the state, such as during the 1970s at University of Dar es Salaam, intellectual work ended up being too wedded to a political program, even when it was critical of the state. The strength of Dar was that it nurtured a generation of public intellectuals. Its weakness was that this generation failed to reproduce itself. This is a fate that will repeat in the future if research is not put back into teaching and PhD program in Africa are not conceived of as training the next generation of African scholars.

Someone told me yesterday that Makerere requires every PhD thesis to end with a set of recommendations. If true, this indicates a problem. A university is not a think tank. A university may house think tanks, even several, but a university cannot itself be a think tank. Think tanks are policy-oriented centers, centers where the point of research is to make recommendations. In a university, there needs to be room for both applied research, meaning policy-oriented research, and basic research. The distinction is this: unlike applied research which is preoccupied with making recommendations, the point of basic research is to identify and question assumptions that drive the very process of knowledge production.

The postgraduate initiative at MISR

I believe one of the biggest mistakes made in the establishment of MISR as a research institute was to detach research from postgraduate education. The formation of the new College of Humanities that has brought the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences and MISR under a single administrative roof gives us a historic opportunity to correct this mistake. MISR will aim to offer a multi-disciplinary Doctoral program in the qualitative social sciences and the Humanities.

The initiative at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) is driven by multiple convictions. One, key to research is the formulation of the problem of research. Two, the definition of the research problem should stem from a dual engagement: on the one hand, a critical engagement with the society at large and, on the other, a critical grasp of disciplinary literature, world-wide, so as to identify key debates within the literature and locate specific queries within those debates.

Faced with a context where the model is the consultant and not the independent researcher, we at MISR think the way forward is to create a PhD program based on significant preparatory coursework, to create among students the capacity to both re-think old questions and formulate new.

Our ambition is also to challenge the foundations of the prevailing intellectual paradigm which has turned the dominant Western experience into a model which conceives of research as no more than a demonstration that societies around the world either conform or deviate from that model. This dominant paradigm dehistoricizes and decontextualises other experiences, whether Western or non-Western. The effect is to devalue original research in Africa.

The global market tends to relegate Africa to providing raw material ("data”) to outside academics who process it and then re-export their theories back to Africa. Research proposals are increasingly descriptive accounts of data collection and the methods used to collate data; collaboration is reduced to assistance, and there is a general impoverishment of theory and debate. If we are to treat every experience with intellectual dignity, then we must treat it as the basis for theorization. This means to historicize and contextualize not only phenomena and processes that we observe, but also the intellectual apparatus used to analyze these.

Finally, MISR will seek to combine a commitment to local (indeed, regional) knowledge production, rooted in relevant linguistic and disciplinary terms, with a critical and disciplined reflection on the globalization of modern forms of knowledge and modern instruments of power. Rather than oppose the local to the global, it will seek to understand the global from the vantage point of the local. The doctoral program will seek to understand alternative forms of aesthetic, intellectual, ethical, and political traditions, both contemporary and historical, the objective being not just to learn about these forms, but also to learn from them. Over time, we hope this project will nurture a scholarly community that is equipped to rethink—in both intellectual and institutional terms—the very nature of the university and of the function it is meant to serve locally and globally.

Coursework

Coursework during the first two years will be organized around a single set of core courses taken by all students, supplemented by electives grouped in four thematic clusters:

· Genealogies of the Political, being discursive and institutional histories of political practices;

· Disciplinary and Popular Histories, ranging from academic and professional modes of history writing to popular forms of retelling the past in vernaculars;

· Political Economy, global, regional and local; and

· Literary and Aesthetic Studies, consisting of fiction, the visual and performing arts and cinema studies.

Translated into a curricular perspective, the objective is for an individual student’s course of study to be driven forward by debates and not by orthodoxy. This approach would give primacy to the importance of reading key texts in related disciplines. In practical terms, students would spend the first two years building a bibliography and coming to grips with the literature that constituted it. In the third year they would write a critical essay on the bibliography, embark on their own research in the fourth year, and finally write it up in the fifth.

Inter-disciplinarity

Over the 19th Century, European universities developed three different domains of knowledge production — natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences — based on the notion of "three cultures”. Each of these domains was then subdivided into "disciplines.”

Over the century, from 1850 to the Second World War, this became the dominant pattern as it got institutionalized through three different organizational forms: a) within the universities, as chairs, departments, curricula, and academic degrees for students; b) between and outside universities at the national and international level, as discipline-based associations of scholars and journals; c) in the great libraries of the world, as the basis for classification of scholarly works.

This intellectual consensus began to break down after the 1960s, partly because of the growing overlap between disciplines and partly because of a shared problematique. For example, the line dividing the humanities from the social sciences got blurred with the increasing "historicization” and hence "contextualization” of knowledge in the humanities and the social sciences. The development was best captured in the report of the Gulbenkian Commission chaired by Immanuel Wallerstein. As inter-disciplinarity began to make inroads into disciplinary specialization, the division between the humanities and the social sciences paled in the face of a growing division between quantitative and qualitative perspectives in the study of social, political and cultural life. But these intellectual developments were not matched by comparable organizational changes, precisely because it is not easy to move strongly entrenched organizations. Though the number of interdisciplinary and regional institutes multiplied, collaboration rarely cut across the humanities/social science divide.

The challenge of postgraduate studies in the African university is how to produce a truly inter-disciplinary knowledge without giving up the ground gained in the disciplines. The challenge of MISR is how to reproduce a generation of researchers by joining research to postgraduate education. Our incorporation into the new College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and thereby an end to our standalone status, has created this opening for us – one we hope to seize with both hands.

Distrust of ethnic minorities 'cancelled out' by positive contact

E-campus — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 14:18:09 GMT

7 Jan 14

Researchers surveyed 868 white British and 798 ethnic minority adults from 224 neighbourhoods

A study reveals that the level of distrust felt by white British people towards ethnic minorities rises in line with the diversity of their local area. Yet the more day-to-day contact they have with each other, the less threatened they feel and this effectively 'cancels out' the distrust.

The level of ethnic diversity had no significant effect on the trust levels reported by those surveyed from ethnic minorities. The findings are published in the journal Psychological Science.

Lead author of the study Dr Katharina Schmid of Oxford University's Department of Experimental Psychology, said: 'Our research shows that having a diverse population does not result in high levels of distrust when the people in that area are also in regular contact with each other in a positive way. People feel less threatened and so the best way to reinforce trust is to encourage different groups to mix. This social interaction could be at the level of meeting up socially or simply a trip to the corner shop.'

To find out how ethnic diversity affects levels of trust amongst communities across England, face to face surveys were conducted with 868 white British and 798 ethnic minority adults from 224 neighbourhoods. The neighbourhoods were wide-ranging, both in wealth and ethnic diversity. Participants were asked to numerically rate how much they trusted people from their own and other ethnic groups in their area. The survey also asked them whether they felt threatened by other groups and asked them what level of contact they had with other ethnic groups.

'We wanted to test the controversial idea that diversity drives down neighbourhood trust, often suggested by previous studies,' said Dr Schmid. 'Up until now, many studies have focused mainly on attitudes towards different ethnic groups, but this is only one part of the story. Importantly, we have found that positive contact between majority and minority ethnic groups plays a big part too. When you add this to the equation, you see that the negative impact of diversity on trust vanishes.'

The economic and political impacts of immigration on jobs, benefits and services are widely studied, but discussions around the social effects of diversity on trust are under-researched and often based on anecdotal evidence. This latest research, the most comprehensive study of diversity and trust in England to date, could inform policy relating to immigration and social cohesion.

'This is a debate in which psychology can offer important insights,' said Professor Miles Hewstone of Oxford University's Department of Experimental Psychology, senior author of the study. 'We find that diversity offers opportunities for positive contact between people of different groups, with positive consequences for trust. Having frequent positive interactions with other groups reduces how threatened people feel, cancelling out any negative effects.'

To test the effects of neighbourhood diversity on trust and threat, white British people were asked questions about whether they felt ethnic minorities threatened their way of life, increased crime levels that affected them directly, or took their jobs. Ethnic minority participants were asked the same questions about white British people.

Similarly, each group was asked how often they interact with people from other groups in everyday situations, for example in corner shops. More broadly, respondents were also asked how much they trust people from their own and other ethnic groups as well as everyone in their neighbourhood.

The study controlled for key factors including age, gender, education, income and neighbourhood wealth as these can affect trust independently of diversity.

Psychotic personality' could be key to making people laugh

E-campus — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 14:11:35 GMT

Comedians show high levels of psychotic personality traits, according to new research published in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

The finding, by researchers from the University of Oxford and Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, suggests that an unusual personality structure could be the secret to making other people laugh.

Recent research has focused on the popular belief that creativity is associated with madness. However, most studies have focused on people who work in the arts and sciences, and little attention has been paid to the possible association with comedy and humour.

The researchers recruited 523 comedians to take part in their study – 404 men and 119 women. The participants were recruited from comedy clubs, agencies, associations and societies, mainly in the UK, USA and Australia.

All the comedians were asked to complete an online questionnaire designed to measure psychotic traits in healthy individuals. The four different aspects measured by the questionnaire are: Unusual Experiences (belief in telepathy and paranormal events); Cognitive Disorganisation (distractibility and difficulty in focusing thoughts); Introvertive Anhedonia (reduced ability to feel social and physical pleasure, including an avoidance of intimacy); and Impulsive Non-Conformity (tendency towards impulsive, antisocial behaviour).

The questionnaire was also completed by 364 actors – another profession used to performing in front of an audience – who acted as a control group. The comedians' and actors' questionnaire results were compared with each other, and with a general group of 831 people who had non-creative occupations.

The researchers found that comedians scored significantly higher on all four types of psychotic personality trait compared with the general group. Most striking was their high scores for both extraverted personality traits (as measured by the Impulsive Non-Conformity scale) and introverted personality traits (as measured by the Introvertive Anhedonia scale). The actors scored higher than the general group on three types – but did not display high levels of introverted personality traits.

The researchers believe that this type of unusual personality structure may help explain comedians' ability to entertain.

Professor Gordon Claridge, of the University of Oxford's Department of Experimental Psychology, said: 'The creative elements needed to produce humour are strikingly similar to those characterising the cognitive style of people with psychosis – both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Although schizophrenic psychosis itself can be detrimental to humour, in its lesser form it can increase people's ability to associate odd or unusual things or to think "outside the box". Equally, manic thinking, which is common in people with bipolar disorder, may help people combine ideas to form new, original and humorous connections.'

Professor Claridge added: 'Our study shows that, as creative people, comedians rate highly on the same personality traits as those regularly observed in other creative individuals. The traits in question are labelled "psychotic" because they represent healthy equivalents of features such as moodiness, social introversion and the tendency to lateral thinking.'

Makerere VC takes over management of confused CIT College

E-campus — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 13:22:31 GMT

By YAHYA SSEREMBA

Article Summary: Dr. Josephine Nabukenya and Dr. John Ngubiri had become virtual dictators at the College, withholding staff allowances for no clear reason. The new development leaves the duo redundant.

Author Biography: Yahya Sseremba is the publisher of The Campus Journal news website.

The vice chancellor of Makerere University has taken over the management of the College of Computing and Information Sciences in a radical step intended to end an internal struggle for money that had wreaked havoc on the unit.

In a letter dated 28, March 2013, a copy of which The Campus Journal news website has obtained, the VC Prof. John Ddumba-Ssentambu instructs the acting principal of the College, Dr. John Ngubiri, to hand over office to the deputy vice chancellor in charge of academic affairs, Prof. Lillian Tibatemwa-Ekirikubinza, on 2, April 2013.

"The Management retreat that met on 25th - 26th March 2013, discussed and noted that the management of the College of Computing and Information Sciences had continuously become a challenge,” Prof. Ddumba’s letter reads in part. "The purpose of this communication is to inform you that the Office of the Vice Chancellor has taken over the management and administration of the College of Computing and Information Sciences.”

The takeover comes as teaching staff members plot to pass a vote of no confidence in the Dean of the School of Computing and Informatics Technology, Dr. Josephine Nabukenya, and as non-teaching staff conclude a strike over non payment of their top-up allowances.

Earlier last month, teaching assistants and assistant lecturers laid down their chalk when the administration of the College, particularly the School of Computing, insisted that they were not entitled to any payment for teaching evening classes.

This struggle is rooted in the privatization and commercialization reforms that Makerere adopted in the 1990s.

Genesis of the problem

As western-imposed policies forced government to cut public expenditure on higher education, East Africa’s finest institution of higher learning started admitting fee-paying students in order to survive.

Whereas the little revenue that still came from government catered for staff salaries and other centrally-executed activities, the revenue that was collected from private students remained at faculty level to pay top-up for staff.

This top-up was necessary since lecturers, who initially taught small classes of only government-sponsored students, were required to teach much larger classes of government and private students combined. They were also required to teach evening classes of solely private students.

Whereas other faculties duly paid top-up to their staff on a reasonable basis, the School of Computing used an unclear criterion that allocated huge sums of money to PhD holders, associate professors and full professors on the one hand and gave peanuts to teaching assistants and assistant lecturers.

While the so-called senior staff received roughly shillings 3 million as monthly top-up, the rest, generally known as junior staff, were paid just about shillings 300,000. This disparity marked the first area of contention, with the cheated party arguing that top-up should be determined by salary scale, not by unclear standards that favour a handful of individuals.

The second area of conflict was the failure to pay junior staff for teaching evening classes. When the teaching assistants and assistant lecturers went on a sit-down strike in February over these issues, Nabukenya, the Dean, threatened to dismiss them.

But the vice chancellor intervened and, in a letter addressed to the principal of the College dated 8, February 2013, ruled that all extra activities, including the teaching of evening classes, "be paid for”. He added that top-up allowances "be paid according to rank/salary scales”.

But far from implementing these directives, the leadership of the College, particularly Dr. Ngubiri and Dr. Nabukenya, continued playing hide and seek and failed to pay the teachers what rightly belongs to them.

Nabukenya seems to be a power-hungry, money-thirsty woman who does not shy away from hullabaloo. Exploiting the absence of Prof. Ddumba earlier this month, she allegedly manipulated a deputy vice chancellor to block the payment of top-up, claiming that contract staff, another name for teaching assistants and assistant lecturers, were not entitled to such allowances.

This irritated the affected teachers who consequently started mobilizing each other to get rid of Nabukenya once and for all. Junior staff members enjoy a numerical advantage sufficient to constitute the two thirds majority required to kick Nabukenya out of office.

It was at this point that Prof. Ddumba intervened once again, this time totally ridding the faculty of the stubbornness of Nabukenya and her henchmen.

"This is therefore to request you to hand over office to the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic Affairs) by Tuesday, April 2, 2013,” the vice chancellor ordered Nabukenya’s immediate boss, Dr. Ngubiri.

"By copy of this letter, all members of staff of the College are duly informed and requested to accord the new Ag. Principal due support.”

E-campus professor pushes her limits on ‘Amazing Race’

E-campus — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:09:24 GMT

In this Road Block, Cathi (with husband Bill) must memorize a phrase from Confucius in order to receive the next clue on The Amazing Race. photo: Robert Voets, CBS

When you’re 62 years old and you’ve spent 40 years as a tireless educator, odds are that your wish list consists of nothing more than a desire to sit down and relax for once in your life.

Cathi Alden thinks that philosophy is bogus. The E-campus recently spent her "retirement” on a mission to do the following:

Teach online classes at a major university
Convince her husband to audition for a reality TV show
Compete against former Olympians and other world-class athletes in a contest that clearly was not designed for "grandparents”
Surprise herself and millions of naysayers by displaying superior know-how on national TV

That’s how Cathi and her husband, Bill, spent their summer. What’d you do?

It’s OK to be in awe of (or feel inferior to) the Aldens. That’s actually the proper response considering that they recently won the hearts of countless viewers of CBS’ hit show, "The Amazing Race.”

Perhaps no one followed Cathi’s TV exploits more excitedly than colleague Sue Helback, who leads the Ecampus online Master of Education program.

"I read in the newspaper that she was on the show, and I thought, ‘I know this lady! She teaches in my online program,’ ” Helback said. "And every Sunday night, I’d be in my office and close my door and say, ‘Nobody bother me; my show is on.’

"I had never said those words before in my life. I don’t have ‘a show,’ but she had me hooked.”

That show – in which 11 teams of two trek around the world and take part in various challenges – has always intrigued Cathi and her husband, so much so that she convinced him to send an audition tape in 2009, and they were accepted last summer.

Before that, the Aldens played the part of armchair analysts to perfection, watching the show from their home on a farm in Albany, Ore., certain that they could endure the physical and mental strain of the challenges.

And then they met their opponents, and all their confidence evaporated.

"Terror. That sums it up. We were absolutely terrified when we saw them,” Cathi admits now. "There was one guy who played in the NFL, two Olympic snowboarders, a 19-year-old kid who had sailed around the world by himself, two people who had won ‘Survivor.’ And all of the teams were 30 years younger than us.

"We thought we might be eliminated in the first round.”

CBS may have thought so, too. They never referred to the Aldens as "teachers” or "educators” – it was always "grandparents” or "farmers” in bold, yellow letters across the TV screen.

It wasn’t the biggest vote of confidence, but Cathi and Bill quickly found their niche, using keen intellect and the skills they obtained years earlier – biking through Europe and navigating subway systems in unfamiliar places – to outpace other teams.

Their No. 1 advantage? Being nice and liking one another.

"We had a lot of success interacting with local people in the various countries, and we were never hesitant to ask for help wherever we were,” said Cathi, who retired as a high school principal in Corvallis in 2005 and immediately began teaching Ecampus courses. "Some teams spent a lot of time and energy arguing, and that gave us some confidence.”

They didn’t win the $1 million grand prize, but they finished in fifth place – better than half of the other teams. Along the way, the Aldens visited eight countries on three continents and took part in a series of bizarre challenges, from a bodybuilding competition to running a bunny through an obstacle course and everything in between.

"Did (Cathi) tell you about the time she had to carry a bedframe in Africa?” Helback asks, sounding more than a little impressed. "So here’s this petite, 60-year-old woman, staring at a huge wooden bedframe in Malawi, and she just loads it on her back and does the rest of the challenge. I was blown away. She just never gave up.”

And that seems to be Cathi’s defining characteristic, a zeal for life that keeps her foot on the accelerator, retirement be damned. Without that passion, she and Bill might have missed out on a significant moment of clarity.

"Every time I meet someone from another culture, it stretches you and enriches you,” she said. "It was a huge boost of confidence in our ability to be with people in other countries and feel so secure that most of the people in the world are very solid, very decent people.

"It was an incredible experience.”

~ Tyler Hansen

New Online Degree in Computer Science

E-campus — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 17:19:43 GMT

E-campus today unveiled one of the Africa's first online post-baccalaureate degree programs in computer science, creating a short pathway to new career opportunities in virtually any industry for millions of students, professionals and unemployed workers worldwide.

The program, delivered online through OSU Ecampus, provides students with knowledge and skills in programming fundamentals, software engineering, mobile and web development, user interfaces and computer systems and networking.

Those who already hold a bachelor's degree - a B.A. or B.S. - from an accredited institution can add to their existing skill set and enhance their job prospects by earning an online computer science degree from OSU in as little as one year.

And once the program is complete, OSU educators say the opportunities are seemingly endless.

"The need for expertise in computer science has now become so pervasive that these skills can be paired with almost any other type of college degree, and it actually amplifies the value of both of them," said Terri Fiez, head of OSU's School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

"And as our economy is recovering, there is an explosion of companies who are coming here looking for employees. This program will create workers who are able to fill those high-paying jobs."

The average annual salary for people in computer science-related fields ranges from $60,000 to $90,000, according to OSU.

No previous computer science experience is required to enroll in the program, which begins with OSU's summer term on June 25. Learn more and register online at ecampus.oregonstate.edu.

It is possible for students to earn their computer science degree in 12 months, but the one-year track is intense and requires full-time status as an online student. Students may also opt to finish the program in two, three or four years.

Fiez expects students who add a second degree in computer science to see their value on the job market skyrocket. Merging a degree in psychology with a new computer science degree could lead to a career in user interface design. Or biology and computer science could be paired to forge a career in bioinformatics and medical information systems.

The combinations leading to new job opportunities are limitless, and the nation's computing industry is in dire need of people who are capable of doing the work.

"There's this perception that all the computer science jobs were outsourced or sent offshore, but the reality is, computing skills are needed in every industry, and computer science jobs are readily available throughout the U.S.," Fiez said.

The coursework is designed for active learning and aims to engage students while equipping them with industry-relevant computing skills that will hold value well into the future.

"We have 15 classes that we're developing, and we picked the best, most qualified person - the faculty member who is an expert in that subject - to create each course," Fiez said. "It's a very innovative program and delivery method, and the fact that students can complete the program from anywhere in the world is revolutionary."

About Oregon State University Ecampus: Through its comprehensive online degree programs, OSU Ecampus provides adult learners with access to a high-quality education no matter where they live. Ecampus offers 30 undergraduate and graduate degree programs and is regionally accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. Earlier this year, SuperScholar.org ranked OSU among the nation's 10 best colleges that administer online degrees. Learn more about OSU degrees online by visiting ecampus.oregonstate.edu.