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Our research explores the experience of adults looking for flexible online learning opportunities that intersect with university study. We interviewed 58 people living in 14 African countries who have taken a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) developed by the University of Cape Town. The interview data reveals diverse uses of MOOCs in workplace contexts. While only two of those we interviewed articulated a goal of making a career change, there were many more taking a MOOC for some form of self-development within their current profession. There were also cases where people had not yet identified a new career, but believed the knowledge and skills would support future transitions. Our intentions for exploring the expectations of MOOC takers regionally is to improve our understanding of how universities, following open practices, could support the educational aspirations of this audience through the provision of flexible online learning opportunities.

When the National Benchmark Tests (NBTs) were first considered, it was suggested that the results would assess entry-level students' academic and quantitative literacy, and mathematical competence, assess the relationships between higher education entry-level requirements and school-level exit outcomes, provide a service to higher education institutions with regard to selection and placement, and assist with curriculum development, particularly in relation to foundation and augmented courses. We recognise there is a need for better communication of the findings arising from analysis of test data, in order to inform teaching and learning and thus attempt to narrow the gap between basic education outcomes and higher education requirements. Specifically, we focus on identification of mathematical errors made by those who have performed in the upper third of the cohort of test candidates. This information may help practitioners in basic and higher education. The NBTs became operational in 2009. Data have been systematically accumulated and analysed. Here, we provide some background to the data, discuss some of the issues relevant to mathematics, present some of the common errors and problems in conceptual understanding identified from data collected from Mathematics (MAT) tests in 2012 and 2013, and suggest how this could be used to inform mathematics teaching and learning. While teachers may anticipate some of these issues, it is important to note that the identified problems are exhibited by the top third of those who wrote the Mathematics NBTs. This group will constitute a large proportion of first-year students in mathematically demanding programmes. Our aim here is to raise awareness in higher education and at school level of the extent of the common errors and problems in conceptual understanding of mathematics. We cannot analyse all possible interventions that could be put in place to remediate the identified mathematical problems, but we do provide information that can inform choices when planning such interventions.

Leishmania parasites are transmitted to mammalian hosts through the bite of sandflies. These parasites can infect phagocytic cells (macrophages, dendritic cells, and neutrophils) and non-phagocytic cells (B cells and fibroblasts). In mice models, the disease development or resolution is linked to T cell responses involving inflammatory cytokines and the activation of macrophages with the M1/M2 phenotype. However, this mechanism does not apply to human infection where a more complex immunological response occurs. The understanding of interactions between immune cells during Leishmania infection in humans is still limited, as current infection models focus on individual cell types or late infection using controlled human infection models (CHIMs). This study investigated the early parasite infection in freshly isolated peripheral blood-derived (PBD) leukocytes over 24 h. Flow cytometer analysis is used in immunophenotyping to identify different subpopulations. The study found that among the L. aethiopicaGFP-associated leukocytes, most cells were neutrophils (55.87% ± 0.09 at 4 h) and monocytes (23.50% ± 0.05% at 24 h). B cells were 12.43% ± 0.10% at 24 h. Additionally, 10–20% of GFP+ leukocytes did not belong to the aforementioned cell types, and further investigation revealed their identity as CD4+ T cells. Data not only confirm previous findings of Leishmania infection with PBD leukocytes and association with B cells but also suggest that CD4+ T cells might influence the early-stage of infection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe the evolving learning design of a computer-based exercise called "Director's Cut" that challenges students to create their own video sequence from a set of clips we provide. The context is a film theory course where the community of educators have been interested in introducing practical exercises so students can, for example, experience how their choices influence which character the audience identifies with most strongly. This design process is presented within the theoretical frames of multimodality and production based learning, offering insights into how we balanced constraints and creativity as learning designers in the context of a South African university

THERE IS AN ESSAY in Peter Sirr's collection Intimate City which describes his looking in the window of an old favorite bookshop, Greene's of Clare Street, Dublin, and finding it [...]

MOOCs have been seen as holding promise for advancing Open Education. While the pedagogical design of the first MOOCs grew out of the Open Education Movement, the current trend has MOOCs exhibiting fewer of the original openness goals than anticipated. The aim of this study is to examine the practices and attitudes of MOOC educators at an African university and ask whether and how their practices and attitudes become open after creating and teaching a MOOC. Activity Theory is used to contextually locate the educators' motivations and to analyse their practices in terms of striving towards an object. With this lens we describe how educators' openness-related practices and attitudes change over time in two different MOOCs. Two sets of conceptions of open practices are used to detect instances of change, providing four dimensions of changed open educational practices. Semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and artefacts provide data for this rare study, which considers these issues from the perspective of the Global South. Through studying the educators' practices in relation to openness, it becomes evident how open practices are emergent and responsive.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a new form of educational provision occupying a space between formal online courses and informal learning. Adopting measures used with formal online courses to assess the outcomes of MOOCs is often not informative because the context is very different. The particular affordances of MOOCs shaping learning environments comprise scale (in terms of numbers of students) and diversity (in terms of the types of students). As learning designers, we focus on understanding the particular tools and pedagogical affordances of the MOOC platform to support learner engagement. Drawing on research into learner engagement conducted in the broader field of online learning, we consider how learner engagement in a MOOC might be designed for by looking at three pedagogical aspects: teacher presence, social learning, and peer learning.

EOGHAN SMITH'S first novel The Failing Heart was a welcome breath of stale air in the world of the Irish novel. It concerned itself not with the materialism of post-Catholic [...]

In this paper we propose that learning in engineering involves taking on the discourse of an engineering community, which is intimately bound up with the identity of being a member of that community. This leads to the notion of discursive identity, which emphasises that students' identities are constituted through engaging in discourse. This view of learning implies that success in engineering studies needs to be defined with particular reference to the sorts of identities that students develop and how these relate to identities in the world of work. In order to achieve successful learning in engineering we need to recognise the multiple identities held by our students, provide an authentic range of engineering-related activities through which students can develop engineering identities and make more explicit key aspects of the discourse of engineering of which lecturers are tacitly aware. We include three vignettes to illustrate how some of the authors of this paper (from across three different institutions) have applied this perspective of learning in their teaching practice.

In this paper, we propose that learning in engineering involves taking on the discourse of an engineering community, which is intimately bound up with the identity of being a member of that community. This leads to the notion of discursive identity, which emphasises that students' identities are constituted through engaging in discourse. This view of learning implies that success in engineering studies needs to be defined with particular reference to the sorts of identities that students develop and how these relate to identities in the world of work. In order to achieve successful learning in engineering, we need to recognise the multiple identities held by our students, provide an authentic range of engineering-related activities through which students can develop engineering identities and make more explicit key aspects of the discourse of engineering of which lecturers are tacitly aware. We include three vignettes to illustrate how some of the authors of this paper (from across three different institutions) have applied this perspective of learning in their teaching practice.

Powerful applications such as Microsoft Office's Excel and Word are widely used to perform common tasks in the workplace and in education. Scripting within these applications allows unanticipated user requirements to be addressed. We show that such extensibility, intended to support office automation-type applications, is well suited to the creation of learning activities and learning environments. We have developed a range of tutorial activities using Excel and Word in introductory mathematics, writing and economics courses. These tutorials have the dual purpose of teaching academic concepts and practical computer literacy skills. The software architecture of our learning environment includes a database-supported back-end to automatically record students responses, which allows for greater control over what students do. Additionally, this allows one to automate common procedures to improve usability and feedback automation to support learning. We have been applying our ideas for the last six years and currently 1,500 students are using the environment. We suggest that this pragmatic solution can provide a high degree of interactivity and flexibility in a range of learning contexts that represents a cost-effective alternative for use alongside traditional approaches.

There are concerns about mental health in academia globally, which is a direct consequence of an increase of a neoliberal entrepreneurial approach, one heightened during the time of the pandemic. This paper uses Skotnicki and Nielsen's categories of alienation and Fisher's work on capitalist realism to make sense of academic staff's responses to a survey on their experiences with Emergency Remote Teaching, collected in 2021 at a large research-intensive university in South Africa. The responses indicate that participants all experienced some form of alienation, though experienced and expressed differently. We suggest expanding Skotnicki and Nielsen's lens on agency and structure with what we found missing, an element of culture, to ask the question: "How can a university create and rebuild a sense of community and belonging to counter alienation?". We propose a concerted effort to build spaces for collective encounters to rediscover community, which may allow us to re-imagine a future for the academy beyond conflicting imperatives of responding to the need for socio-economic redress and delivering education as a public good, in times of austerity budgets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]