Cette étude parle de l’application du système d’assurance qualité au lycée à l’ère de la Réforme en Indonésie ; de l’interprétation qu’en font les acteurs (gouvernement, école, usagers) et de ses implications. En Indonésie, il existe diverses politiques visant à améliorer la qualité de l'éducation. Premièrement, le gouvernement a créé le « BSNP » pour élaborer le standard de l'éducation nationale. Deuxièmement, le gouvernement a organisé « l’UN » (l'examen national). L’UN est un système d'évaluation standard de l'enseignement au niveau national. Troisièmement, le gouvernement donne de « BOS » à toutes les écoles. C’est une aide financière à chaque école. Quatrièmement, le gouvernement met en place un programme de « certification de l’enseignant ». C’est un processus de certification professionnelle pour les enseignants et les professeurs. Cinquièmement, le gouvernement a changé le paradigme de l'apprentissage. Avant, le processus d'apprentissage utilisait un modèle centré sur l'enseignant ou « teacher centered learning ». Ce modèle a été remplacé par un modèle d’'apprentissage centré sur l'élève » ou « student centered learning ». Sixièmement, le gouvernement a augmenté le budget de l'éducation nationale de 20% du budget national. Septièmement, il mise en œuvre de la gestion scolaire comme base de l’école ou MBS. La MBS est un système de gestion qui fournit une large autonomie aux écoles pour gérer les ressources en fonction des besoins de l'école. Cette étude met en évidence différentes conceptions de la qualité dans le système scolaire notamment au Lycée. Le gouvernement conçoit la qualité à partir de la réussite scolaire selon huit standards de l’éducation. Selon les directeurs et les enseignants, le gouvernement devrait examiner les efforts déployés pour améliorer la qualité de l'école car les écoles évoluent dans différents contextes. Les conditions d'input sont les facteurs qui influent sur ces différences. Ceux-ci comprennent : la capacité socio-économique des élèves divers, l'intelligence de l'élève, et ainsi de suite. Le facteur géographique scolaire devient également un facteur qui détermine le succès des écoles pour répondre aux standards.Les élèves et les parents ont une conception pragmatique de la qualité. Ils voient la qualité de l'école par l’indicateur visible : les installations scolaires, le nombre d’inscrits, la réussite, la qualité des diplômés, la qualité des enseignants, et d'autres facteurs. Ils ne considèrent pas le statut d'accréditation. Le critère d’accessibilité géographique est important pour les parents. Ils choisissent une école près de chez eux pour économiser sur les coûts du transport. Cette étude montre qu’en Indonésie, il existe une concurrence entre les écoles parce qu’elles n’ont pas le même niveau de qualité. Les écoles publiques sont en concurrence avec les écoles privées. Il existe également une concurrence entre écoles publiques. Les parents choisissent librement une école en tenant compte des politiques mises en avant. / This study describes the implementation of high school quality assurance system in the reform era in Indonesia; interpretation of government, schools, and societes about school quality; and school quality assurance policy implications.In general, there are some national education policies to improve the quality of education in Indonesia. First, the government established "BSNP" (bureau of national educational standards) to develop national education standards. Second, the government organized a national examination (called Ujian Nasional or UN). UN is a system of educational assessment at the national level. Third, the government provides "BOS" (School Operation Support) for all schools. This is a financial aid for each school. Fourth, the government provides "teaching certification". This program is a certification process for teachers and lecturers. Fifth, the government has changed the paradigm of learning. Previously the process of learning was "teacher centered learning". After that, the government transformed this model into "student centered learning". Sixth, the government increased the national education budget amounted to 20% of national income. Seventh, the implementation of MBS (Manajemen Berbasis Sekolah) or school-based management. MBS is a management system that provides broad autonomy to schools to manage resources according to the needs of the school.This study shows different opinions about the quality of the school. The government saw the quality of the school of the success of the eight schools meet educational standards. According to school principals and teachers, the government should review the efforts to improve the quality of school because each school has different conditions. Input conditions are the factors that influence these differences. These include socio-economic capabilities of students, student intelligence, and so forth. Geographical factors of schools also determine the success of the school to meet those standards.Students and parents have a practical idea. They see the quality of schools with indicators that ca: the school facilities, the number of applicants, school achievement, the quality of graduates, the quality of teachers, and other factors. They do not see the status of accreditation. School is a practical consideration for parents. They chose a school close to home to save on transport costs.This study also shows that competition emerges between schools due to the difference of schools ability and pragmatic view of society. Sociologically, the difference of schools’ quality has caused competition among schools in Indonesia. Public schools have to compete with private schools, as well as with other public schools. School choice policies have motivated parents to choose the desired schools freely.

In an age where the sharing economy has proliferated as a preferred means of travel in the tourism industry, and the accommodation sharing platform Airbnb has risen to the forefront, there is much criticism and discussion about the need for such nascent platforms to operate in alignment with sustainable development. Currently, economic benefits for the host and guest lie at the core of Airbnb’s sustainability appeal, while few concrete steps have been taken to advance environmental and social values. Many have proposed a green rating system and sustainability-oriented search filters as a means to propagate these values and catalyze a necessary paradigm shift within the sharing economy. Through the lens of green architecture and construction, this study analyzes the extent and manner in which sustainability features and amenities are promoted by hosts on Airbnb in the high-desert mountain town of Taos, New Mexico. This case study approach selects and intriguing destination that is not only characterized by a long history of earthen building traditions by the Tiwa people, but was also the birthplace of the world-renowned, off-the-grid Earthship concept. An analysis of all active Airbnb listings was compared with a more targeted analysis of off-the-grid listings to reveal that hosts more often than not frame their sustainability features and amenities in terms of visitor comfort, convenience, and enjoyment. For instance, the valorization of earthen adobe building for its authenticity and cultural appeal in lieu of its energy efficient and natural qualities. This indicated a high level of unexploited potential, wherein hosts could enhance their listing’s sustainability appeal and educational value through reframing these features to potential guests, and off-the-grid listings could benefit from implementing and promoting sustainable practices and emphasizing the local culture. Most importantly, after quantitively analyzing the features that arose, this study assembled the content basis for a theoretical green rating system and sustainability search filters that could be applied to Taos as a localized system, or merely provide insight to other destinations and the Airbnb platform as a whole.

The thesis "The Evaluation of University Education Quality: The Comparison of the Czech Republic and Kazakhstan" disputes about quality evaluation system in university education area in the Czech Republic and Kazakhstan. During the elaboration of this thesis several analyses were made: the qualitative analysis of the documents from the area of education quality assurance; analysis of the internal and external evaluation of university education quality and the analysis of actors. In conclusion are presented the recommendations for governmental level of decision making process and the university network.

Additional information available on a CD stored at the Merensky Library.The purpose of this study was to explore the concept of quality in early learning centres which could serve as the groundwork for the development of an early learning quality assurance framework in South Africa. The data used reflects different beneficiaries‘ experiences of quality in early learning centres. The unique contexts of, and situations at early learning centres were considered. A theoretical framework, based on Woodhead‘s model on quality development, informed the study. The framework consists of input (structural), process and outcome quality indicators. In this explanatory instrumental case study framed within social constructionism, the researcher partnered with 235 teachers, 235 mothers and 235 teacher students from a middle income group, to generate mixed method data using surveys, as well as interviews and reflective journals in a statistical and thematical analysis. Beneficiaries‘ conceptualisations of quality mirrored accepted norms of quality in early learning centres. Beneficiaries indicated the following as indicative of quality: children‘s social-emotional well-being and holistic development, a normative foundation for values and respect, effective infrastructure and accountable learning. Aspects regarded as quality indicators by beneficiaries were available at early learning centres. In this regard early learning centres provided more indoor than outdoor facilities. The latter were mostly static outdoor structures which could negatively impact on sensory- and motor development. The promovenda developed a draft quality assurance framework based on the following criteria: school climate, infrastructure, curriculum, communication, teacher competence, learning environment, and support services. The findings show that aspects perceived by beneficiaries as quality indicators in an early learning centre are predominantly process indicators and hard to ‗measure‘ in a quantitative way. A quality school climate enables emotional and social well-being. In this regard, the findings suggest that for the beneficiaries quality concerns were not about that which early learning centres have provided in terms of facilities (input indicators), but rather about centres that promote children‘s holistic well-being. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Educational Psychology / unrestricted

<p>  </p> <p>A multidisciplinary study that evaluated Quality Control (QC) laboratory (lab) accreditation, and a salt screen for bedaquiline. Medicines testing facilities always seek to ensure the accuracy of data from their QC labs by attaining accreditation. This research proposed that an understanding of the cross-linkages in the requirements for implementing the 2 most widely used lab standards will facilitate testing efficiencies, and reduce the risks of accreditation failures. For the salt project, the study proposed that new salts of bedaquiline will be formed from acid-base reactions following the pKa rule. Characterizing the salts will provide specifications for the new molecular entities, and form a selection-criteria for a lead candidate.</p> <p>The research reviewed 2 lab standards: the ISO/IEC17025:2017 and the WHO Good Practices for Pharmaceutical QC labs, and identified the areas of overlap in their requirements. It then developed and tested affordable models that mitigate the 3 identified areas of high risks to lab accreditation. Additionally, it mixed<em> equimolar amounts of bedaquiline base with select counterions that have ≥ 2 pKa units in organic solvents, to yield salts</em>. ICHQ6 guidance was used to characterize the new salts.</p> <p>The highest risks to laboratory accreditation were linked to 3 quality system metrics, namely: ‘Proficiency Testing’, ‘Validation’, and ‘Measurement Traceability’. Using the identified areas of overlap in the 2 laboratory standards, this research provided tutorial videos, a competency matrix, and some instrument validation data, to optimize the requirements for lab accreditation. For the salt screen, five new candidates were synthesized as alternatives to the existing fumarate salt of bedaquiline. The results of their physicochemical properties were used for selecting a lead moiety.</p> <p>The research provided evidence that the multipronged models developed will improve efficiencies in QC labs, and increase their chances of attaining international accreditations. It also discovered the best modes for synthesizing the new salts of bedaquiline, and provided critical data to help Pharma make an informed choice for a lead candidate.</p>

This dissertation proposes two novel ideas to enhance the business strategy alignment to customer needs. The proposed business alignment clock is a new illustration to the relationships between customer requirements, business strategies, capabilities and processes. To line up the clock and reach the needed alignment for the enterprise, a proposed clock mechanism is introduced. The mechanism integrates the Enterprise Business Architecture (EBA) with the House of Quality (HoQ). The relationship matrix inside the body of the house is defined using multivariate data analysis techniques to accurately measure the strength of the relationships rather than defining them subjectively. A statistical tool, multivariate data analysis, can be used to overcome the ambiguity in quantifying the relationships in the house of quality matrix. The framework is proposed in the basic conceptual model context of the EBA showing different levels of the enterprise architecture; the goals, the capabilities and the value stream architecture components. In the proposed framework, the goals and the capabilities are inputs to two houses of quality, in which the alignment between customer needs and business goals, and the alignment between business goals and capabilities are checked in the first house and the second house, respectively. The alignment between the business capabilities and the architecture components (workflows, events and environment) is checked in a third HoQ using the performance indicators of the value stream architecture components, which may result in infrastructure expansion, software development or process improvement to reach the needed alignment by the enterprise. The value of the model was demonstrated using the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) process at the Industrial Engineering and Management Systems department at the University of Central Florida. The assessment of ABET criteria involves an evaluation of the extent to which the program outcomes are being achieved and results in decisions and actions to improve the Industrial Engineering program at the University of Central Florida. The proposed framework increases the accuracy of measuring the extent to which the program learning outcomes have been achieved at the department. The process of continuous alignment between the educational objectives and customer needs becomes more vital by the rapid change of customer requirements that are obtained from both internal and external constituents (students, faculty, alumni, and employers in the first place).

In recent years, there have been incidents which decreased people's trust in some organizations and authorities responsible for ratings and accreditation. For a few prominent examples, there was a security breach at Equifax (2017), misconduct was found in the Standard & Poor's Ratings Services (2015), and the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (2022) validated some of the low-performing schools as delivering higher standards than they actually were. A natural solution to these types of issues is to decentralize the relevant trust management processes using blockchain technologies. The research problems which are tackled in this thesis consider the issue of trust in reputation for assessment and review credibility at different angles, in the context of blockchain applications. We first explored the following questions. How can we trust courses in one college to provide students with the type and level of knowledge which is needed in a specific workplace? Micro-accreditation on a blockchain was our solution, including using a peer-review system to determine the rigor of a course (through a consensus). Rigor is the level of difficulty in regard to a student's expected level of knowledge. Currently, we make assumptions about the quality and rigor of what is learned, but this is prone to human bias and misunderstandings. We present a decentralized approach that tracks student records throughout the academic progress at a school and helps to match employers' requirements to students' knowledge. We do this by applying micro-accredited topics and Knowledge Units (KU) defined by NSA's Center of Academic Excellence to courses and assignments. We demonstrate that the system was successful in increasing accuracy of hires through simulated datasets, and that it is efficient, as well as scalable. Another problem is how can we trust that the peer reviews are honest and reflect an accurate rigor score? Assigning reputation to peers is a natural method to ensure correctness of these assessments. The reputation of the peers providing rigor scores needs to be taken into account for an overall rigor of a course, its topics, and its tasks. Specifically, those with a higher reputation should have more influence on the total score. Hence, we focused on how a peer's reputation is managed. We explored decentralized reputation management for the peers, choosing a decentralized marketplace as a sample application. We presented an approach to ensuring review credibility, which is a particular aspect of trust in reviews and reputation of the parties who provide them. We use a Proof-of-Stake based Algorand system as a base of our implementation, since this system is open-source, and it has a rich community support. Specifically, we directly map reputation to stake, which allows us to deploy Algorand at the blockchain layer. Reviews are analyzed by the proposed evaluation component using Natural Language Processing (NLP). In our system, NLP gauges the positivity of the written review, compares that value to a scaled numerical rating given, and determines adjustments to a peer's reputation from that result. We demonstrate that this architecture ensures credible and trustworthy assessments. It also efficiently manages the reputation of the peers, while keeping reasonable consensus times. We then turned our focus on ensuring that a peer's reputation is credible. This led us to introducing a new type of consensus called "Proof-of-Review". Our proposed implementation is again based on Algorand, since its modular architecture allows for easy modifications, such as adding extra components, but this time, we modified the engine. The proposed model then provides a trust in evaluations (review and assessment credibility) and in those who provide them (reputation credibility) using a blockchain. We introduce a blacklisting component, which prevents malicious nodes from participating in the protocol, and a minimum-reputation component, which limits the influence of under-performing users. Our results showed that the proposed blockchain system maintains liveliness and completeness. Specifically, blacklisting and the minimum-reputation requirement (when properly tuned) do not affect these properties. We note that the Proof-of-Review concept can be deployed in other types of applications with similar needs of trust in assessments and the players providing them, such as sensor arrays, autonomous car groups (caravans), marketplaces, and more.

This study analysed the learning environment of undergraduate medical and health sciences students of the School of Medicine University of Zambia who were studying at the Ridgeway Campus. Premised on the theory that learner’s perception of the learning environment determines approach to learning and learning outcome, the study utilized a descriptive, quantitative, and non-experimental design to articulate the issues that characterise the learning environment of the programmes. The aim was to provide framework based on these, and use it to propose a strategy for improving the learning environment of the School. The Dundee Ready Educational Environment Measure (DREEM) questionnaire was administered to 448 participants from year 2 to year 7 classes of medicine, pharmacy, and physiotherapy programmes. Total DREEM, subscale, and individual items’ scores were analysed statistically and compared by analysis of variance among the programmes. The issues determined formed the framework for strategy development, and strategic options were proposed based on evidence obtained from literature. With a global DREEM score of 119.3 ± 21.24 (59.7 %), the students perceived their learning environment as “more positive than negative.” One sample binomial test of hypothesis for categorical variables returned a p value <0.05, with a verdict to ‘reject the null hypothesis,’ thereby confirming a more positive than negative perception. Subscale scores also showed ‘more positive’ perception. There were no significant differences between scores from the different programmes when compared by Games Howell test, P> 0.05, thereby upholding the second hypothesis. Analysis of individual items revealed problems in six items, which were summarised into four strategic ssues: inadequate social support for stressed students, substandard teaching and mentoring, unpleasant accommodation, and inadequate physical facilities. The implications of the findings for theory and practice were discussed and strategic options proposed to address the issues. The study concludes that analysis of the learning environment of medical schools provides more insight for strategic planning and management. / Health Studies / D.Litt. et Phil. (Health Studies)

This study examines the current pastoralists' education situation in Uganda in the context of the education policy established, and non-formal education interventions being conducted among the Bahima and Karimojong pastroralists by both Governmental and Non-Governmental Organizations, as an attempt to address the problems and issues of illiteracy and pastoral development. It is evident that education for pastoralists in Uganda creates a social consciousness with values, norms, knowledge and skills, which have a complex and dynamic relationship among the pastoralists. The problems of investigation in this research focus on information available on the functioning of pastoralism for effective provision of non-formal education programmes to the Bahima and Karimojong pastoralists; and how effectively the providers of non-formal education programmes can integrate the nomadic livelihood in the provision of non-formal education The literature review has focused on the Bahima and Karimojong pastoralists, but attempts have also been made to draw relevant lessons from other nomadic groups like Gypsies, travellers, and occupational travellers. The review has been intended to sharpen specific aspects related to pastoral and national education practices that can enable appropriate and strategic provision and implementation of non-formal education programmes to occur among the Bahima and Karimojong pastoralists in their pastoral context. Qualitative research methods used in the study were fundamentally relevant and suited for locating the meaning that semi-nomadic Bahima and Karimojong pastoralists placed on events, processes and structures of their lives, their perceptions, assumptions, prejudgments, presumptions, and for connecting these meanings to the social world around them. Presentation and analysis of data is divided into three sections including a recast of the items in the interview schedules, a summary of the research findings presented on a conceptually clustered Matrix Sheet, and a presentation of the data analysis resulting form the data displayed on the Matrix Sheet. Recommendations of the study have been clustered under the following three thematic categories: · Relevance of non-formal education programmes to the Bahima and Karimojong pastoraslist, · Factors for implementation of non-formal education programmes, and · Strategies for implementation and sustenance of non-formal education programmes among the Bahima and Karimojong pastoralists. / Educational Studies / MED (COMPARATIVE EDUCATION)

This study investigates awareness and use of communicative language teaching methodology (CLT) in a foundation programme at an institution of higher learning in the Sultanate of Oman, where rapid expansion and a reliance on expatriate skills has resulted in the employment of predominantly native English teachers, many with inadequate formal teacher training. The qualitative research methodology employed involved a core of five teachers using three data-gathering instruments and ten additional English language teachers who responded to a questionnaire. The study finds that the majority of teachers have inadequate knowledge of the CLT approach and do not use it in the classroom. The findings suggest that an adapted version of CLT which embraces local contextual and sociocultural conditions may be pedagogically viable. The study draws comparisons between the idea of a hypothetical, “adapted” version of CLT and the notions of “particularity, practicality and possibility” as suggested by Kumaravadivelu (2006). / English Studies / M.A. (Specialisation in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, TESOL)