Submitted in full compliance with the requirements for a Master’s degree in Technology: Dental Technology, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2017. / Post-apartheid restructuring of the South African Higher Education system has brought about significant changes. Institutions of Higher Learning have implemented minor and major changes in their objectives, delivery of knowledge, functions, accreditations and overall outcomes (Du Pre 2006, Reddy 2006, Department of Education 1997). One of the more significant transitions within South Africa’s Higher Education landscape has been the conversion of technikons into universities of technology (UoTs) (Powell & McKenna 2006). This thesis investigates the discourses of academics within a university of technology, exploring their responses to and constructions of institutional shifts. The study has an ontological focus in that it is interested in the ‘being’ of Dental Technology academics. It is interested in the discursive constructions not only of themselves as academics, but also of their work in this changed institutional context. By conducting interviews with the Dental Technology academics lecturing in universities of technology in South Africa, it was the intention to explore these academics’ discourses on institutional shifts. Adopting discourse analysis as the primary method of data analysis enabled the exploration of how academics constructed the notion of academic identity, how they discursively constructed students and knowledge, as well as other core issues related to their work. / M

D.Litt. et Phil. (Biblical Studies) / The God of the Bible is like an axiom, never proved, yet the basis of all life and living. Axioms are never proved, but they are the essential presuppositions on which every other proof rests. But this does not say that the idea of God in the Bible does not change. Man's grasp of the character of God developed from age to age and from centuary to centuary often due to particular socio-political circumstances. It began with some primitive ideas about God. God was regarded as a storm god dwelling in a mountain, whose major activity was war. He was also seen as a person, physical I y embodied, though superhumanIy powerfulI, who could conceivably be seen and who, in the earliest strata of the Scripture walked and talked, wrestled, dined and smelled and who shared with man a wide gamut of good and bad emotions. Further, in those earliest times God was a tribal god. He was the possession of the people of Israel, just as the people of Israel was his possession. God's power is also thought to be limited to his territory and to his people. This limitation to the power of God is to some extent taken away when God becomes the God of Canaan, for then He became an agricultural god as well. In the wilderness journeys there had been no possibility of this, but once the people came to Canaan they got into contact with the Canaanite Baals who were not only giving victory in battle...

This thesis reports on a literature survey and an investigation that was done on the Histology course for MBChB II learners at Medunsa. All aspects of the course were investigated including the present course as well as the possibility of replacing the lectures by multimedia computer presentations and a video. The multimedia computer presentations were specially developed for the study while an earlier developed video was also included into the study. Two instruments were used to gather information from the learners. Responses from a questionnaire as well as learner records were statistically evaluated. This information as well as information gathered from the literature was used to design a new proposed course in histology. A number of issues emerged from the study. The first issue is that histology is the least favourite of all the subsections of Anatomy. Learners prefer to study their histology by watching a video. The learners who watched the video more than four times did not do better than the others. Multimedia changed the attitude of the learners towards histology to some extent. Learners have a perception, which could not be proved, that if they study with the aid of multimedia their marks and their recollection will improve. Learners often left lectures before the end or did not attend. The reason that the learners indicated for this tendency was lack of concentration. Most learners want the system of lectures changed. They want some lectures to be replaced by multimedia. Most learners rate the histology lectures as good. The majority of learners do not want the histology course to be changed into a multimedia course. From the study it is clear that the microscope can be successfully replaced by an instructivist way of learning like a video or a multimedia computer presentation. It is however not ideal to replace a constructivist way of learning, like using a microscope, with a way of learning that is only instructivist, therefore it is suggested that the microscope is replaced by another constructivist way of learning. Providing groups of learners with unique images from the histology slides to be studied and annotated was suggested. It also became clear that if a computer-based histology course is to be implemented in future, learners will have to go through a transitional phase where the lectures and practicals are gradually replaced by multimedia. / Thesis (PhD (Information Science))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Information Science / unrestricted

Nearly seven hundreds of students each year apply for informatics' studies at University of economics, Prague (UEP). At the beginning, each one must complete two courses related to programming - Introduction to Programming and Fundamentals of Software Engineering. Both courses produce a lot of outputs -- simpler home works or more complex semestral projects -- which must be assessed by the teachers. Especially assessment of early home works is laboring and routine which makes it perfect candidate for automation. The goal of this work is to suggest the best suitable way how to implement this automation at UEP. Since mass courses make troubles universities all around the world there is already a lot of existing solutions how to automate evaluation of programming courses. First two chapters summarize the effort to find the most interesting ones and present them to the Czech audience. Because existing solutions are really sophisticated but does not provide white box tests support needed at UEP the rest of this thesis is not about creating own new automatic assessment system but about creating a middleware which can handle the problem mentioned. The middleware called Duckapter makes usage of Java reflection API easier and is downloadable from project website http://code.google.com/p/duckapter. Using them, the teachers can provide white box tests inside the black box (unit) tests which are supported by the most of the current automatic assessment systems.

This work deals with timetabling problems at the Faculty of Information Technology of Brno University of Technology. The aim of this thesis is to design and implement new application to support manual timetable planning, that will offer some innovations in comparison with current state. Implemented application is based on client-server architecture, at which client and server communicate by means of REST interface. Application offers functions for preprocessing of input data, as well as functions for analysis of created timetables. Data can be exported in HTML format.

The purpose of this study was to assess the achievement of older learners when using computer-assisted-instruction tutorials with no time limits and to compare this achievement with that of other older students who were taught by the conventional lecture method of instruction. The effects of prior formal education, physical limitations, socioeconomic status, and sex were also identified. Students in the age categories fifty-five to sixty-seven and sixty-eight and over were placed at random in either a control group that would receive instruction in the conventional lecture method or a treatment group that would receive computer-assisted-instruction. Each of the students in the study completed a demographic data form, received instruction, and was tested over the topics which had been covered. The test scores and demographic data were summarized and analyzed using two-way analysis of variance. The purpose of the analysis was to determine (1) if there was a significant difference in the effectiveness of the two methods of instruction, (2) if there was a significant difference in the performance of the two age categories, (3) if there was a significant interaction between the age levels and the methods of instruction, and (4) if the test scores were affected by past formal education, physical limitations, socioeconomic status, or sex. It was determined that students in the computer-assisted-instruction groups scored as well as those in the conventional lecture method of presentation groups. There were no significant effects from past formal education, physical limitations, socioeconomic status, or sex. However, there were trends in the data that warrant further study. It was recommended that educators be encouraged to use computer-assisted-instruction tutorials when working with older students. CAI was found to be at least as effective as the more conventional lecture method, and the growth and expansion of computer technology makes this a viable option for future educational programming.

The purpose of this two-part study is to examine how to improve introductory level non-majors biology courses to improve student attitude and learning gains in the sciences. The first part of this study examines the collective effect of three different pedagogies (service learning, concept mapping and guest lectures) on student attitude and learning gains in a freshman, non-majors biology course. Two classes, one with the three pedagogies, and one without, were compared. Data were collected from two classes in Fall 2008 (one treatment and one control) and two similar classes replicated in Fall 2009. Learning and attitude gains were measured by a pre and post biology assessment and the Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) survey. Our findings indicate that the treatment methods did not improve student learning or attitudes compared to the control group. However, there was a significant increase in variability in the treatment group, indicating that the students exposed to the three pedagogies either had a very positive experience or a negative one, whereas the control group did not have this variability. Thus, the treatment did have a positive effect on some students. Both treatments experienced significant gains from pre to post on the biology assessment and SALG survey. The second part of the study investigated what concepts are considered by students and faculty to be most important to teach in introductory non-majors biology courses. A survey with 17 biology concepts was given to life science professors at BYU and UVU and biology students at BYU. Participants were asked to rank the concepts from most to least important. There were significant differences between professor and student mean rankings for 11 of the 17 biology concepts. This study showed a large discrepancy between what professors want students to learn and what students feel is important. It was particularly noteworthy that students ranked ecology and evolution as least important. This was especially alarming since evolution is considered to be the capstone of all biology and ecology is vital for capturing the "big picture" in biology.

À la suite de son édition du Satiricon de Pétrone, A. Ernout présente soixante-trois extraits constitués, d'une part, de témoignages ou citations effectués par des auteurs anciens qui commentent Pétrone, et, d'autre part, de fragments poétiques en vers attribués à Pétrone par des scribes du Moyen Age et par des humanistes. Ce corpus, transmis en dehors de la tradition manuscrite directe du Satiricon, représente le fondement de notre mémoire, qui se donne pour objectif d'en produire une édition critique comportant un établissement du texte latin accompagné d'un apparat critique sommaire, une traduction française et un commentaire explicatif détaillé. Ce commentaire, à la fois littéraire, historique, linguistique, stylistique et métrique, vise à éclairer la signification générale de ces textes, à apporter une contribution à l'étude de leur authenticité pétronienne et à permettre de faire un bilan des informations nouvelles qu'ils procurent sur le contenu du Satiricon.

Ce mémoire de maîtrise porte sur la préparation de l’homélie. Il s’intéresse particulièrement aux éléments et aux pratiques qui participent à son élaboration dans le parcours préparatoire de l’homéliste. Située dans un cadre qualitatif, une enquête menée à partir d’entrevues individuelles auprès d’homélistes d’ici a permis d’explorer leur pratique à partir des trois pôles suivants: l’étude des textes proposés par la liturgie, la prise en compte des éléments de communication et la personne même de l’homéliste. Les données recueillies mettent en lumière que l’homéliste dans sa manière personnelle d’être et de croire joue un rôle central pour créer dans et par l’homélie un espace de co-existence où il rejoint ses auditeurs avec succès.

Increasing involvement with students at the University of Namibia has indicated their overall difficulty with comprehending and recalling information from oral content lectures. It has also been observed that in general very little attention is given to the development of listening skills in L2 ESP and EAP courses. For this study, I conducted a quasi-experiment to determine whether the recognition and interpretation of discourse markers will enhance students' listening comprehension in academic lectures. Students were tested to determine their comprehension of content information in a video-taped lecture. Qualitative data were collected by means of a questionnaire. After an intervention period of eight weeks, where the experimental group received strategy training in the recognition and interpretation of discourse markers in spoken texts, both groups were again tested. Their results were statistically compared. I also looked at related findings of other researchers. Finally, aspects for possible future research will also be considered. / English Studies / MA - (Specialisation in TESOL)