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Introduction: We report an investigation on collaboration practices in research papers published in the most prestigious English-medium astrophysics journals. Method: We propose an evaluation method based on three numerical indicators to study and compare, in absolute terms, three different types of collaboration (international, national and local) and authors' mobility on the basis of co-authorship. Analysis: We analysed 300 randomly selected research papers in three different time periods and used the student's t-test to determine whether the paired two-sample differences observed were statistically significant or not. Results: International collaboration is more common than national and local collaboration. International, national and local authors' mobility and intra-national collaboration do not seriously affect the indicators of the principal levels of collaboration. International collaboration and authors' mobility are more relevant for authors publishing in European journals, whereas national and intra-national collaboration and national mobility are more important for authors publishing in US journals. Conclusions: We explain the observed differences and patterns in terms of the specific scope of each journal and the socio-economic and political situation in both geographic contexts (Europe and the USA). Our study provides a global picture of collaboration practices in astrophysics and its possible application to many other sciences and fields would undoubtedly help bring into focus the really big issues for overall research management and policy.

This study aims to identify the literacy skills of individuals whose highest level of education was in the field 'teacher training and educational sciences'. The study sample comprised 10,618 individuals in the field of teacher training and educational sciences, selected from 31 countries (participating in the International Adult Skills Assessment Programme during the 2014-2015 survey) using a multi-stage sampling method. The study employed multi-level latent class analysis and three-step analysis in order to determine both the number of multi-level latent classes of educators' literacy scores as well as the selected independent variables' success in predicting those latent classes. The analysis revealed that educators in Germany constituted the group with the highest literacy skills while educators from Singapore comprised the group with the lowest literacy skills. [This study was presented at the 9th International Congress of Educational Research. Ordu University, Ordu, Turkey.]

Purpose: Free and open-source software (FOSS) has been used worldwide because of the advantages of user control, cost-saving, flexibility, openness, freedom, more security and better stability. The purpose of this study is to explore the status quo of educational application of FOSS and the trends from international perspectives and its implications for higher education in Hong Kong. Design/methodology/approach: The method of cluster analysis was used in this study. The Web of Science database was used as the data source and all relevant literature for the year 2010-2020 on the theme of "FOSS" was collected for analysis. The information visualization software CiteSpace was used for citation visualization analysis, revealing the research results of FOSS worldwide, including hot spots and development trends. Findings: This paper found that FOSS has become an important research area and is playing an important role in the reform and development of education. Meanwhile, the development and application of FOSS have regional imbalances and strong differentiation, including the educational sector. The paper also found that although FOSS has entered the stage of interdisciplinary development, the research and development of FOSS in the field of education is insufficient, which poses a huge challenge to decision-makers, teachers and students. Originality/value: Implications for higher education in Hong Kong including: attach importance to and vigorously promote FOSS research and practice to benefit more teachers and students; teachers and students need to be trained for acquiring the awareness and skills of FOSS applications and formulate different strategies; the government should provide greater support to formulate and implement a short and middle-term development plan to facilitate the application of FOSS; and Hong Kong higher education institutions may strengthen exchanges and cooperation with counterparts around the world to jointly promote the development of FOSS. It is hoped that the findings will provide a reference for the study and application of FOSS in higher education in Hong Kong.

How is the content of university programs selected and structured? How does it evolve? In the anthropological theory of the didactic, external didactic transposition designates the processes through which knowledge to be taught is delimited and developed for delivery within a school institution, including universities. This paper presents a first international comparative research project focused on the external didactic transposition in European and Canadian undergraduate programs in mathematics. The project aims at analyzing the factors that motivate the evolutions of the programs, the procedures to develop them, as well as the constraints that limit broader modifications and can explain their current state. The exploratory study presented in this paper considers 10 case studies from universities in Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, and Spain. Data is mainly collected from semi-structured interviews with faculty having participated in recent design of undergraduate mathematics programs and syllabi. We identify both similarities and differences between programs and syllabi, with the differences being relatively significant between Canadian and European universities when it comes to the overall structure of programs, and less visible when considering the European programs, as well as the processes in general.

This article maps the scientific production and the contents associated with the sustainable development goals and their integration with universities during the past 21 years. Although many of the topics related to sustainable development goals (SDGs) have been addressed in different studies for decades, it is since 2015 onwards that they gained greater prominence due to the inclusion of higher education as an important actor in the fulfillment of the 2030 agenda and the United Nations SDGs. For the purpose of this paper, a bibliometric analysis of 871 papers, 535 documents in Scopus, and 336 in Web of Science (WoS) from 1998 to 2019 was performed, and the Bibliometrix analysis tool was used. The objective of this mapping is to answer the following research question: Is the integration of the Sustainable Development Goals and Universities a field of study? An analysis of the network of collaborators and trend topics in Scopus and WoS allows us to identify the concurrence and relationships of some keywords, such as sustainable development, sustainability and planning, and some background words, such as humans and global health. In another analysis, the word "higher education" is related to change. This article suggests that the integration of the Sustainable Development Goals in Universities is becoming a field of study under exploration, with a peak of production in 2016 and that has remained stable in the last three years, but thanks to the leading role assigned to Universities, intellectual production should increase in the following years.

Academic libraries, apart from their main function, which is to provide information services to academic communities, may also perform a number of social roles in the broad meaning of the term. Accordingly, they now tend to serve as the third place offering inclusion and animation activities to academic as well as local communities (including potential students) and to groups in risk of social exclusion (immigrants, persons with disabilities, senior citizens, etc.) or in need of various kinds of care and support. However, for libraries to be able to fulfil those tasks, they need properly trained staff who not only have the required competencies but also the right social attitudes. The paper presents an analysis of the social attitudes of academic librarians from twenty countries across the world as compared to the personnel of other types of libraries. The level of individual social capital, activity in social networks, aspirations in life and social and civic engagement were investigated. It was noted that the respondents tend to undervalue the importance of the work done by libraries for local communities. At the same time, the research showed that academic librarians have a somewhat lower level of individual social capital and trust than public librarians and less extensive social networks. Nonetheless, they are open to relationships with others, which enables them to engage in various social projects.

This paper reports preliminary findings on students enrolled in a massive open online course, who were also assigned to work in groups. Part of a larger study on the effect of groups on retention and completion in MOOCs, the paper provides students' demographics (i.e., location, gender, education level, and employment status), and motivation for taking the course. Findings show that women outnumbered men and that students mostly enrolled into the course because of a friend. Indeed, research on MOOCs demonstrates that men outnumber women and that educational pursuit and professional development are the main motivators for taking MOOCs. Yet, this paper shows that when group work is included in a MOOC, women participate more. Furthermore, for students assigned to groups in a MOOC, friends are the principal incentive for enrolling into the course. These results are discussed in light of previous research, and implications for teaching and learning in online environments addressed.

This paper presents a compilation of personal reflections from 66 contributors on the impact of, and responses to, COVID-19 in accounting education in 45 different countries around the world. It reveals a commonality of issues, and a variability in responses, many positive outcomes, including the creation of opportunities to realign learning and teaching strategies away from the comfort of traditional formats, but many more that are negative, primarily relating to the impact on faculty and student health and well-being, and the accompanying stress. It identifies issues that need to be addressed in the recovery and redesign stages of the management of this crisis, and it sets a new research agenda for studies in accounting education.

The term "globalization" does more than represent a set of material (and ideological) processes that have impacts on education and schooling. Additionally, "globalization" operates as a conceptual lens or set of interventions, which is significantly impacting academic discourses in Education and in other disciplines. Not only has "Globalization and Education" (G&E) emerged as a new, trans-disciplinary field of Educational Studies, insights from this field and globalization studies more directly have impacted many other fields of Education. This paper summarizes major impacts of globalization on education and maps out a "first-wave" G&E discourse by analyzing a small set of key texts published around the turn of the century. The paper distills key uses of globalization from this "first-wave" G&E and more recent correctives to clarify the potential applications for--and implications of the "lens" of--globalization for educational scholarship. (Contains 9 footnotes.)

Purpose: While training students to new literacy and critical thinking has been recognized for several decades, it seems even more crucial today as education is presented as a lever to fight against fake news. Preservice teachers, both so-called digital natives at the cutting edge of the social web and tomorrow's educators, represent a useful object of study. The purpose of this paper is to describe preservice teachers' critical thinking skills scores notably regarding environmental factors (training type, country of study and employment) and personal determinants (metaliteracy self-efficacy and belief in the likelihood to become a teacher) in three French-speaking nations (Wallonia, France and Quebec). Design/methodology/approach: Using a quantitative methodology, this article is part of sequential mixed design research aiming to describe the level of preservice teachers' (n = 245) critical thinking in three French-speaking nations: Wallonia, France and Quebec. This study aimed to see to what extent critical thinking skills (measured with a translated version of the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment; Halpern, 2016) can notably be influenced by metaliteracy self-efficacy (MASE). Metaliteracy is a concept that aims to join information, digital and media literacy providing a comprehensive framework "for engaging with individuals and ideas in digital environments" (Mackey and Jacobson, 2011, p. 70). Findings: This study establishes the influence of individual determinants such as the feelings of self-efficacy in metaliteracy as well as the belief in the likelihood of becoming a teacher. This study proposes a model predicting the critical thinking skills based on self-efficacy in critical thinking and metaliteracy, the type of training and the interaction between employment and the country of study. Originality/value: Considering contemporary information issues and infodemic phenomena, critical thinking skills should be developed among preservice teachers. There is a significant positive correlation between MASE and critical thinking skills. Pre-service teachers' country of study, as well as their training trajectory, seems to influence their critical thinking skills. Involvement in professional life also appears to promote critical thinking skills.

Online students use highly emotional language to describe their experiences, indicating that learners do feel a great deal online. This paper draws on Wetherell's exploration of affective practice to theorise learners' responses to the pedagogical and technological online environment. Findings of a research project that focused on two cohorts of online doctoral students are presented, including survey responses and interview data. Thematic analysis indicates that participants experienced positive and negative affects circulating around three sites of intensity: a sense of progression; community interaction and assignment feedback. However, narrative analysis of extracts from the interviews reveal a further level of complexity to the data, drawing attention to the unfinished and shifting character of these affects. The paper concludes by pointing to the implications of this research for designing the online environment in ways that will allow students to experience the full potential of online learning.

Cross-border higher education institutions are considered a main way to fulfill the educational internalization in Mainland China; to some extent they represent the attitude of entering the international market. In this paper, the history, status quo, and future of Chinese-foreign cooperatively-run schools are analyzed and discussed. Cross-border higher education institutions in Mainland China have experienced the process from accidental and disorder to a systematic and quality orientation.

The paper reports on the experienced educator perspective regarding human-to-human connection in distance education. The research questions aimed to fill gaps in the existing research literature, to investigate the role of the educator, to discover how learning and subject content are affected by contextual factors, to find out if it enhances the sense of togetherness (immediacy and intimacy). The Informed Grounded Theory and the Community of Inquiry model provided a scaffolding framework for designing interview questions and analyzing findings. The outcome of the analysis formulated a new theory called tele-proximity, which gives an explanation of how presences could work in synchronicity. The findings may help educators gain insight into how to use Synchronous Video Communication (SVC) and lead future research to dig deeper into the field of synchronicity and the importance of audiovisual cues.

This paper explores the identity of teachers in international schools who are embarking on postgraduate studies in education. Based on semi-structured interviews with 20 teachers starting an international qualification, it establishes key aspects of their identity and notes that they feel distinct from teaching professionals in their passport countries. From this discussion, a tool-box of concepts for understanding the identity of international school teachers is suggested, together with a typology of international school teachers echoing Hayden & Thompson's (2013) typology of international schools. It is suggested that these concepts require further exploration and empirical substantiation in order both to understand their implications for addressing teacher shortages and to understand the knowledge, skills and attitudes that teachers with non-conventional qualifications and backgrounds may offer to schools.

The paper examines if there has been an increase in the attention paid to social and environmental issues (SEI) in accounting curricula. Using schools participating in the Aspen Institute's Beyond Grey Pinstripes (BGP) program, we measure the increase in the number of accounting courses incorporating SEI across the biennial application years of 2005, 2007 and 2009. We also examine the percentage of SEI coverage in accounting courses between 2007 and 2009. Our findings suggest that there was not an appreciable increase in the number of accounting courses dealing with SEI between 2005 and 2007, but that the increase was significant during the period from 2007 to 2009. Further, the increase over the four-year period from 2005 to 2009 was also significant. In addition, there is a significant increase in the percentage of SEI coverage in accounting courses between 2007 and 2009. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Distance education and information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been marketed as cost-effective ways to rescue struggling educational institutions in developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This study uses classroom video analysis and follow-up interviews with teachers, students, and local tutors to analyse the interaction at a distance between learners in Mali and Burkina Faso and their French and Canadian instructors. Findings reveal multiple obstacles to quality interaction: frequent Internet disconnections, limited student access to computers, lack of instructor presence, ill-prepared local tutors, student unfamiliarity with typing and computer technology, ineffective technical support, poor social dynamics, learner-learner conflict, learner-instructor conflict, and student withdrawal and resignation. In light of the near death of the costly World Bank-initiated African Virtual University (AVU), this paper concludes by re-visiting the educational potential of traditional technologies, such as radio and video, to foster development in poor countries. (Contains 2 figures, 1 table and 2 footnotes.)

Discourses around Study Abroad (SA) consistently portray a transformational experience for participants who return home forever changed. This article investigates how such change is inscribed in texts addressed to Australian tertiary students considering SA. Acknowledging the significant role of the non-study component of SA in triggering change, this paper focuses on the non-academic domain of food, recurrent in the corpus, 102 SA testimonials from returnees from French-speaking environments of Canada, France and Switzerland, posted on an Australian Group of Eight university website. It investigates the templates provided to shape the imaginary of the readers as to their ideal selves and to legitimize and ascribe value to particular foods and related practices. Are students guided towards the perpetuation of their habits, or in these "foreign fields", is there an opportunity to shift habitus, with food contributing to the reconstructed self? Drawing on Bourdieu and on theories of motivation and of the ideal self, the article proposes a reading that resolves the tension between the integrative use of food, and the future exploitation of the SA experience as a mark of distinction.

This paper empirically examines the impact of academic research on high-tech manufacturing growth of 28 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and emerging countries over the 1991-2005 period. A standard research and development (R&D) expenditure based measure is found to be too general to capture the input in high-tech research. To overcome this problem, a novel proxy for high-tech research investment--the supercomputer capacity--is proposed. Empirical evidence strongly supports this choice of variable. It is also found that academic R&D exerts a larger growth effect on high-tech output than its industry and government counterparts, but only the impact differential between academic and government R&D is statistically significant.

In this paper, I argue for more and better learning metrics in higher education, eventually through an international, comparative assessment of students' learning outcomes. Better learning measures may help to improve transparency in the system by addressing the information asymmetry problem. If not addressed adequately, the lack of transparency could lead to "bubbles" comparable to those in financial markets. On a systemic level, the higher education community has a definite interest in filling the information gaps by making decisive steps forward in the development of valid and reliable learning metrics.

Taking an international comparative perspective, the paper seeks to identify conditions that favour or impede participation in continuing higher education (CHE), and to answer the question what lessons can be learned from other countries. To this end we present selected findings of a secondary analysis of data from seven countries and systematically relate them to the country-specific institutional context. Our analysis suggests that the present situation and the future development of CHE are strongly path-dependent and context-bound. This systemic character of CHE restricts the transferability of particular features of a country's CHE system. Nonetheless, there remain several lessons to be learned from other countries.

In the late 1990s, sustained economic growth in most Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries and the development of the information economy led to a considerable increase in migration of highly skilled individuals, especially in science and technology. Some OECD countries relaxed their immigration policies to attract highly qualified foreigners to sectors facing labour shortages. In the context of increasing internationalization of education, academic mobility appears as a potential source of qualified workers from host countries' perspective, either during their studies or through subsequent recruitment. Study abroad can be part of a deliberate immigration strategy from the perspective of students. The article reviews the links between academic mobility and immigration and assesses impact on immigration policies. Indeed, some OECD countries are allowing foreign students to apply for resident status from within their territory as part of an immigration recruitment strategy. The impact for sending countries is also envisaged. (Contains 1 figure and 7 tables.)

Discusses how to prepare teachers to use educational technology and how to affect their attitudes toward change. Technology in public schools in Indiana is examined, and the international Long Distance Learning Network Project (LDLN), which was designed to determine the effectiveness of long-distance learning in elementary and secondary schools, is described. (LRW)