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The study on "Educators' Academic Insights on Artificial Intelligence -- Challenges and Opportunities" was conducted to gain a deeper understanding of the rapidly evolving phenomenon of AI in education. This research serves multiple objectives. Firstly, it aims to foster awareness regarding the integration of AI into teaching and learning practices by providing clear definitions of AI and explaining key AI-related terms. It also seeks to illustrate AI's diverse applications within a broader context, with a special focus on AI-supported research and learning platforms. Additionally, the study delves into the current discourse surrounding chatbots, contributing to address the central research question. Lastly, this initiative aims to provide valuable recommendations for effectively harnessing AI in education, enhancing the teaching and learning experience. The researchers conducted a review of literature concerning artificial intelligence. They adopted a qualitative method, using open-ended questions to collect feedback from educators globally, including those from the University of Technology and Applied Sciences, Al Musannah, and participants in the online discussion forum at Oxford English Learning Exchange.com. The qualitative data was analysed, leading to the identification of key themes and subthemes derived from the responses of research participants. The study's findings incorporated a wide range of concerns expressed by educators, comprising ten key subthemes. These concerns ranged from doubts about AI's ability to replace human educators and fears of its potential to hinder student development to worries about its hyped popularity and its perceived futuristic nature. Educators stressed the importance of effective AI training while emphasizing the need to prioritize human expertise over excessive reliance on AI. They were also acutely aware of both the advantages and disadvantages of AI, viewing it as both a potential boon and a looming threat. Furthermore, educators recognized the potential for enjoyable experiences with AI and acknowledged the pivotal role of users in determining the extent of AI adoption. Content analysis revealed additional apprehensions, such as concerns about job displacement, AI's impact on critical thinking, teacher frustration in assessing AIassisted student writing, the use of AI-generated content for assessments, potential erosion of human services, stifling of user and learner creativity by AI, the risk of errors in AI-generated information, opportunities for cheating in exams, and concerns about the overreliance on and overrating of AI platforms. Positively, the findings included an array of opportunities that AI platforms offer. Study participants highlighted various aspects of these opportunities that surpassed their concerns and associated risks. The opportunities are categorized into twenty subthemes: enhancing learner motivation, facilitating template creation, utilizing AI as an educational aid, promoting proper training and fostering positive AI usage, harnessing AI for teaching challenging subjects, enabling personalized learning experiences, offering an interactive tutoring experience, supporting remote learning, facilitating self-study, providing comprehensive educational content overviews, giving instantaneous feedback and evaluation, functioning as search engines and chatbots, enabling content validation, efficiency in terms of cost and time, streamlining material preparation, facilitating skill and language enhancement, promoting familiarity with topics and vocabulary, enabling text-to-speech and speech-to-text conversions, editing multimedia elements, and facilitating content generation.

Several studies have demonstrated the relevance of job demands-resources theory in examining the subjective well-being of Chinese university teachers. Nevertheless, the specific impact and mechanisms of various dimensions of job demands and resources on faculty members' subjective well-being are not well understood. This study seeks to identify the primary predictors of subjective well-being and to explore the connection between specific job demands-resources and subjective well-being through an examination of the sequential mediation of work stress and work-life balance. Questionnaires were completed by a total of 2302 faculty members from 302 universities in China. Correlation analysis and path analysis were employed to examine the relationships between job demands-resources and subjective well-being, as well as their influencing mechanisms. Job demands measured by work hours have a significant negative impact on the subjective well-being of university faculty, with teaching hours emerging as the primary negative predictor. Conversely, job resources have a significantly positive effect on faculty's subjective well-being, particularly decision participation, job security and extensive training, which serve as positive predictors. The relationship between job demands and faculty's subjective well-being is mediated by their work stress, and is further serially mediated by their work stress and work-life balance. Similar patterns are observed in the influence mechanism of job resources on subjective well-being.

This original study presents findings from a study of members of the first cohort of legal degree apprentices. Introduced in the UK in 2016, legal degree apprenticeships (LAs) remove uncertainty towards legal qualification in an otherwise competitive graduate recruitment environment and could help to increase social mobility into the professions. We examine the impact of the LA pathway on the development of wellbeing and capabilities of apprentices and traditional law students through the following research questions: does it enhance wellbeing when instead of loans, debt and insecurity, aspiring lawyers have a salary, no debt and secure job prospects through an apprenticeship pathway to qualification; and does using a capability framework offer a meaningful lens for understanding the experiences on different pathways? The analysis adopts a capabilities approach, intersected with an inequalities lens, to explore interviews with 23 aspiring solicitors, from different social backgrounds and at different stages of progression on the traditional university and LA pathways in England. The interviews explored access to and experiences of both pathways, particularly how participants were able to develop and convert their social and cultural resources into key capabilities. This provided a meaningful way to make sense of participants' experiences. Capabilities were enhanced for LA students by removing stress and uncertainty around employment. This wellbeing gain was corroded for some by long commutes into work--often centred in London. Future quantitative research could establish whether, on balance, the majority of LA students experience an overall wellbeing gain. The capability framework usefully showed how across the LA and university pathways, all participants valued agency and developing all capabilities. Social capital was a key resource for creating opportunity and a desired capability that participants sought to develop.

This study investigates the effects of studying abroad through the Erasmus Programme (EP), a European Union programme launched primarily to foster international mobility and cultural exchange of University students, on the school-to-work transition of university graduates. Since a satisfactory transition does not only mean finding a job, but also concerns the wage level and the quality of work, such as stability, working hours and risk of overeducation, we consider all these aspects in order to draw a comprehensive picture of the effect of the EP. We exploit a composite dataset, built on administrative and survey data, covering all graduates from the largest Italian university from 2011 to 2015, and replicate the analysis on a national sample of graduates to verify whether the results can be extended nationwide. Estimates are provided, based on a PSM procedure, of the effects of the EP on the probability of employment, including abroad, on the quality of jobs and on wage levels at different points in time after graduation. We also investigate whether less advantaged students benefit from the Erasmus experience, and provide insights about the role of the foreign languages skills. The results show that the participation in the EP improves employment prospects at least in the short term, as well as the quality of job, and has a positive long term effect on the participants' ability to find a job abroad. The wages of participants are persistently higher than those of non-participants. Less advantaged groups also benefit from the Erasmus experience.

Job automation is a topical issue in a technology-driven labor market. However, greater amounts of human capital (e.g., often measured by education, and information-processing skills, including adult literacy) are linked with job security. A knowledgeable and skilled labor force better resists unemployment and/or rebounds from job disruption brought on by job automation. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to advance understanding of the association between educational attainment and literacy, and job automation risk. Using the 2012/2014/2017 Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) data, survey-weighted linear regression was used to model the risk of job automation as a function of education, and literacy proficiency. Higher educational attainment (college or higher vs. less than high school: b = -18.23, p < 0.05) and greater literacy proficiency (score 0-500 points: b = -0.038, p < 0.05) were associated with a decrease in job automation risk among the U.S. workforce.

The article explores how Nepalese public schools' traditional hierarchy-dominated educational culture shapes teachers' professional growth and sense of identity. Through the narrative inquiry approach, I explored teachers 'professional identity development using Gee's (2000) identity framework. The data revealed that hierarchy and power relations between the teachers and the social context fundamentally shaped teacher identity development. However, the study further showed that professional hierarchy was not uni-layered, the power was not one-directional, and the domination was not permanent but rather dynamic. Factors like academic qualifications, job status, technological skills, and social status made the hierarchy complex. More interestingly, hierarchical relationships did not always undermine teacher empowerment but confidence in some cases. For example, when a teacher in a marginalized position due to some factors such as poor health condition was viewed as a role model or capable of success despite challenges, they achieved high value from their colleagues.

Introduction: At the beginning of the 2020-2021 academic year, the government, health organizations, and educational institutions had to face the implementation of protocols and action plans within the classrooms to prevent COVID-19. Aim. This study aimed to analyze the thoughts and concerns of Spanish teachers during the academic year 2020-2021. Method: The study involved the participation of 965 teachers (74.3% Women; M[subscript age] = 43.5 9.9). An ad hoc questionnaire comprising 38 items was utilized, focusing on the resources offered by the administration for the return to classrooms, teachers' concerns about this new academic year, and their thoughts on ideal teaching conditions. Results: Differences were observed based on age and gender in the management (P1) (p = 0.02) and support (P2) (p = 0.04) from the educational administration, perceived security (P3) (p = 0.01), reduction of the working day (P5) (p = 0.002), and the adequacy of material (P6) (p = 0.004) and human (P8) (p = 0.04) resources. Teachers with greater experience exhibited differences in the items P2 (p = 0.03), P3 (p = 0.03), and P8 (p = 0.03). Conclusions: Less experienced teachers expressed higher levels of concern, while those with more teaching experience highlighted the need for additional human resources and training.

The market-based imperatives driving economic growth in Western societies have, in ways, both acknowledged and implicit, been used to reorient public institutions - academia dramatically so. This article deals with upending of post-secondary academic hiring priorities, and the impact on the adjunct or sessional lecturers implicated in the change. Over half of the courses offered by academic departments and programs in Ontario, Canada, are now taught by part-time faculty members (Pasma & Shakes, 2018). Their use in post-secondary education is underpinned by a notion of just-in-time course delivery in a free market of untenured PhD holders. This study assessed 26 adjuncts in Ontario, Canada, equally divided between male and female. It found working conditions, development of research dossiers, and health and work-life balance to be characterized by gendered differences and hardships. Although the difficulties of post-PhD adjunct work have been abundantly documented, this work brings to light components of the experience that have not been previously studied, most significantly, its health effects and gendered nature. It concludes with policy recommendations to support adjuncts in Ontario and beyond, including mentorship, longer term contracts, institutional research funding, extended health benefits, and affordable childcare.

A mixed-methods sequential explanatory study was conducted in Indonesia to measure levels of job satisfaction among 326 secondary school English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) teachers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim was to identify significant differences in relation to gender, career stage, school location, school status, and school affiliation, and to establish which factors contributed most to job satisfaction. In the quantitative stage, the results revealed that job satisfaction both before and during the pandemic was generally high. With respect to gender, male teachers were more satisfied than their female counterparts. In terms of career stage, levels of job satisfaction varied before and during the pandemic, with significant differences in terms of pay, promotion, security, and professional development. Teachers working in state schools were more satisfied with their pay and security than teachers in private schools. Furthermore, teachers working in schools under the Ministry of Education were more satisfied with pay and security than those working under the Ministry of Religious Affairs. No significant differences in job satisfaction were identified with respect to school location. The qualitative stage partially supported the quantitative findings, with working conditions, colleagues, professional development, and pay identified as enhancing job satisfaction.

This article analyses the attractiveness of Polytechnics (PTs) in India, which are part of the country's Vocational Education and Training (VET) system, from the perspectives of individuals. PTs as institutions of Higher VET are an essential part of the Indian VET system. As no findings on their attractiveness are available, interviews based on an attractiveness model were conducted with 33 students and 17 parents. Results show that although PTs are attractive from an individual point of view and offer numerous advantages for those striving for education, like a wide range of career opportunities or a high level of job security, their attractiveness is considerably affected because of the societal perspective. However, in particular, the emphasis on the strengths of a PT diploma, like the combination of both theoretical and practical elements and the assignment of PTs to Higher VET may help to improve the rather negative societal perception of PTs.

Singapore, like many other countries in the world, is on a journey towards a culture of lifelong learning to keep its workforce competent, resilient, and future-ready in the rapidly changing world of work. In order to realise this, a significant amount of resources has been invested to the training and adult education (TAE) sector. The TAE sector is expecting considerable and evolving skills demands from the TAE professionals specifically from the adult educators who are directly involved in the training delivery and development activities. With the high skills expectations from the profession, it is important to find out the level and predictors of work satisfaction among adult educators so as to provide necessary support for their performance and development. Work characteristics or quality indicators such as income, work autonomy, complexity, intensity, security, career prospect, professional development support, as well as work expectations were examined in relation to adult educators' work satisfaction. Multivariate analyses show that work autonomy, job security, and professional development support are strong determinants of work satisfaction among adult educators, even after considering adult educators' work expectations and other employment and individual characteristics.

The global education reform movement has led to the development of quasi-markets and the promotion of business-like operation of schools with the goal of improving education for students and opportunities for teachers. While many types of schools have been influenced by marketisation, the international school market is a prime example of how such processes can be fully integrated into education. However, despite the prevalence of market reforms, little is known of their impact on educational employees. This research investigates the perspectives and experiences of teachers in compulsory-age international schools operated by large multi-national for-profit education management organisations to understand how business-like operations within a school market affect their daily work. Semi-structured interviews were used to create items to measure the business influences. Scales were then developed with Mokken Scale analysis and Rasch analysis. The two scales demonstrate distinct patterns of marketisation. The scale of direct business influences on teachers' work includes items on competition between schools, increasing admissions and improving finances, while the scale of indirect influences includes items about job insecurity, hierarchical organisational structures, fear of repercussions when voicing professional opinions, and an emphasis on evidence of learning. Notably, these quantitative patterns were consistent across many different types of schools, both for-profit, non-profit private schools and government schools. These findings demonstrate the strength of researching teachers' experiences to understand the impact of marketisation on education.

We study whether the completion of an optional professional year placement during undergraduate studies enhances job quality, in terms of earnings, job security and career fit, for economics graduates from a UK university. Using linear and discrete choice models, we estimate the effect of doing a professional year placement on four graduate outcomes that capture job quality and use a rich data set to control for demographics, educational background, academic achievement, degree, and graduate job characteristics. To account for possible self-selection bias, we use propensity score matching. We find a positive but weak effect of the professional year placement on earnings, but the salary gap becomes statistically insignificant once we control for self-selection. Similarly, we find no conclusive evidence supporting a positive effect of professional year placement on job security. However, we find a positive and robust effect of professional year placement on career fit: placement graduates are more likely to find jobs that fit their career plans than non-placement graduates, which holds even after controlling for self-selection. The empirical findings also show that job characteristics, like location and type of industry, and school background are additional factors contributing to graduates' employment quality. Finally, we find no differences in job quality due to gender.

This article explores an important aspect of academic precarity: the use of fixed-term contract researchers as factotums within universities. The practice can be defined as the taking-on of tasks that are outside of core research activities, including substantial amounts of time spent teaching, supervising students and preparing research proposals, often at the behest of tenured staff members, reflecting existing power dynamics within the organisation. At a theoretical level, it is argued that this aspect of academic precarity reflects various forms of ambivalence in researchers' lives, creating tensions in addition to expanding their workloads. Using evidence from 54 interviews with researchers of at least five years' experience and based at research units in Portugal, conducted during 2022 and 2023, it is possible to illustrate various aspects of academic precarity and ambivalence, with different responses from researchers including acceptance of and resistance towards the factotum role.

The literature on the lived experiences of early-career researchers (ECRs) has not fully leveraged the analytical potential of the concepts of 'sponsorship' and 'gatekeeping' when examining the importance of senior scholars in their work lives. This article conceptualises the micro-politics of seniors' sponsorship of ECRs based on 19 semi-structured interviews and two focus groups at a Danish university. Sponsorship can take the forms of co-authoring, creating network contacts, or securing funding. The micro-politics of sponsorship enable seniors to mobilise opportunities for juniors, often at the 'backstage' of academia. Sponsorship strengthens the interviewees' feelings of job-related security, but not all ECRs are sponsored. According to the interviewees, sponsorship relationships develop for academic reasons, such as shared research interests, but are also a matter of luck, personal chemistry, and 'homophily', leading to subtle processes of inclusion and exclusion in academia. Regardless, sponsorship is widely considered a taken-for-granted, legitimised practice.

Sessional academic staff form most of the teaching staff cohort in Australian universities. The available literature supports that this important staff cohort often experience precarious and insecure work, restricted access to training, support and development, and limited opportunities for career progression (compared to their colleagues in on-going positions). This national embedded mixed methods study explored the perceptions of sessional academic staff regarding support, development, and psychosocial wellbeing in Australian Universities. To complement the semi-structured interviews, sessional staff completed an online questionnaire. Our findings highlight that due to negative sessional academic work conditions, sessional staff have poor career progression and psychosocial wellbeing outcomes in the long-term.

This paper examines how pracademics who teach at different universities in Ghana contribute to shaping their academic development. In this study, a pracademic refers to an industry practitioner who is employed by a university as a part-time academic to teach academic courses and support the knowledge and skills development of learners. Using a dialogical narrative approach, data were gathered from 14 pracademics who teach academic courses at different universities in Ghana. The findings revealed that the academic development of pracademics is linked to their unique professional identity, the social networks that support their personal and professional growth, and the complex professional community in which they operate. The narratives of the participants revealed that the network of pracademics serves to promote their common interests, which include needs (social, job-related, and resources), expectations, access to opportunities, and their ability to promote academic disciplines. Additionally, pracademics are likely to be highly motivated to join informal networks within a broad context - pracademia, when they know that issues concerning their job security and professional development in the areas of teaching, research, and engaged scholarship will be prioritised by the management of universities.

This paper explores the top ten issues and ideas for the future of teaching and learning in the post-pandemic world. The study uses the researcher's informed reflection as a method. The informed reflector role allows the researcher to explore realities from multiple dimensions by scanning existing teaching and learning scholarship. The subjective accounting, the lack of external verification of the thinking, overshadows limitations. The researcher devises phenomenological bracketing to reduce the researcher to a reflector. The researcher acknowledges that there could be other critical issues and ideas than those in this study. Nevertheless, the reflections shared in this study may contribute to the existing stock of all other contemplations, discussions, and debates.

Education is of great importance for all individuals in a society from the very beginning. Individuals have regarded education as the most important way to achieve their goals. In this context, university education, which prepares individuals to work life, has an important place in all societies. However, although individuals start university with great hopes, after a while, concerns and question marks about the future begin. At this point, activities that will contribute to the effective career planning of university students and guiding them on become important. The aim of the present study was to analyze the views of pre-service Turkish language teachers on their careers and career plans. Phenomenology, one of qualitative research methods, was adopted in the study. The study group included 64 pre-service teachers studying at Turkish Language Education department in a large-scale university in the east of Turkey. An interview form which included 4 open-ended questions and was developed by the researcher was used to collect data. The data were analyzed using descriptive analysis. The findings demonstrated that the majority of the participants did not have an effective career plan; they lacked knowledge on their respective fields of study, and their career plans generally focused on teaching and academic professions.

Background/purpose: In this study, the precarization of educational labor was identified in terms of teachers' job insecurity perceptions. The purpose of the study was to examine the job insecurity perceptions of teachers with permanent, fixed-term, or temporary contracts. Materials/methods: Multiple case design was used in the study. The data of the study were collected from 30 teachers through semi-structured interviews and from 432 teachers using the Teachers' Job Insecurity Scale, which was developed within the scope of the study. Thematic analysis, descriptive statistics, t-test, one-way ANOVA, Sidak test, and clustering analysis were used in the analysis of the obtained data. Results: The study's results revealed that teachers perceived intense explicit and implicit job insecurity. Clustering analyses showed that 69% of the participants perceived moderate and high levels of both explicit and implicit job insecurity, whereas 73% perceived moderate and high levels of general job insecurity. Job insecurity had social, psychological, and educational effects. Justification of insecurity, instrumental use of power against job insecurity, acquiescence of job insecurity, and acceptance of job insecurity caused structuration of job insecurity. Conclusion: The study's findings indicate that all teachers should be employed on a permanent contractual basis in order to reduce their perceptions of job insecurity and its effects. The autonomy of teachers within the teaching process should be increased, their employment benefits improved, and they should be economically empowered.

The aim of the present article is to purpose new career counselling perspectives for vulnerable workers in the time of COVID-19 recession. We summarize perspectives on vulnerable workers following a recently advanced taxonomy on the work precarity framework characterized by three broad categories: precarity of work (i.e. fear and concern associated with the continuity of employment), precarity at work (i.e. psychosocial or physical safety at work, including discrimination, harassment, and unsafe working conditions), and precarity from work (i.e. uncertainty and insecurity due to maintaining employment that does not satisfy the basic needs of workers). These three facets of precariousness are frequently experienced by vulnerable workers, and they are related to poorer mental and physical health. The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically exacerbated this trend for vulnerable workers. Thus, suggestions for mitigating the impact of the current crisis are presented. Our perspective deals with the psychology of sustainability, sustainable development, and the psychology of working theory. In this framework, vocational psychologists could reform and reorganize specific career counselling practices for vulnerable workers, promoting sustainable and decent work and inclusivity. This could be achieved by applying four key points: (1) Enrich career counselling interventions with the processes of self-identity, reflection, and reflexivity on what constitutes actual sustainability for vulnerable workers in terms of professional and personal development; (2) Promote the use of an evidence-based methodology in accordance with the accountability principles for the 21st century; (3) Advocate to enrich available services with positive primary preventive strength-based actions and interventions through timely differentiated career counselling strategies; ( 4) Encourage applied research and practices to find new ways to balance resources with evidence-based efficacy; for example, by using the power of the audience in group-based life design counselling.

Much of the research on the benefits of graduate education for minority students has focused on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Little has been done on Predominantly Black Institutions. This case study attempts to shed light on alumni perceptions of the benefits of their graduate education at a Predominantly Black Institution (PBI), Chicago State University. The researchers surveyed the accessible population of Chicago State University alumni who completed requirements for their master's and doctoral degrees between the academic years 2008 and 2018. Results indicate that perceived benefits fell into two categories: (1) personal benefits that accrued to the graduate and (2) enabling benefits that encouraged the completion of graduate study. Personal benefits included personal fulfillment, an enhanced knowledge of a profession or discipline, and advancement in a career including promotions and salary raises, while some enabling benefits included perceived program quality, the financial accessibility of graduate study at a PBI, and a supportive learning environment. Findings from this study of alumni can lend insights to effective approaches to teaching graduate students from diverse backgrounds.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the experiences of China recruiters during the pandemic, particularly with their job stress and sense of job security. The study also explored the new norms of Chinese students' recruitment following the post-pandemic crisis. Using qualitative analysis, we found that China recruiters experienced different stressors during the pandemic regardless of their working location. The participants recognized the importance of communication and seeking institutional support to help overcome their stress during the pandemic. They suggested that higher education administrators should be sensitive to the needs of their international recruiters. The participants also suggested several new norms for future recruitment, such as using the hybrid recruitment model, promoting university collaboration, initiating joint programs between US and Chinese institutions, and hiring domestic recruiters. Implications for practice are discussed. [Note: The page range (104-120) shown on the PDF is incorrect. The correct page range is 104-121.]

In this paper, we draw upon in-depth interviews with teachers and administrators in 18 unionized charter schools around the country to investigate teachers' motivations for unionization. Our results suggest that while mismanagement and distrust are often the proximate cause of charter unionization efforts, both material and purposive goals--greater job security and pay as well as increased voice in school decision-making--power organization drives and contract negotiations. Our evidence suggests unionization and collective bargaining agreements can create more transparency around pay and development, which teachers desired. But, sometimes unionization carried unanticipated risks for administrators--salaries increased faster than revenues and teacher development became constrained by newly formed collective bargaining agreements.

It is well known that teachers are central to education reforms and to providing high-quality instruction. The National Curriculum Framework 2005 identifies the need for professionally qualified teachers and the need to enhance the professional identity of schoolteachers. Low-fee private schools are often presented as a solution to the supposedly poor quality of education provided by government schools. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines the micro-managed context of teachers' work in low-fee private schools in semi-urban Delhi. It illustrates ways in which curriculum and pedagogy were used to control teachers' work and analyses these observations in the light of New Public Management discourses. This article argues that teachers strongly constructed their work as provisional and used silence and exit as a way to cope within the highly regulated work environments of the school.

The present research aimed at investigating the direct effect of civil servant teacher job satisfaction on their absenteeism. Quantitative approach with survey method was employed. The sample involved was 198 civil servant teachers from public senior high schools in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia. The result signified that t[subscript count] < t[subscript table] (-2.84<-1.97) leading to the acceptance of H[subscript 0] and the rejection of H[subscript 1]. This explicitly stated that civil servant job satisfaction has a negative direct effect on their absenteeism. For job satisfaction predictors, positive attitude places the highest position followed by comfort in work and certainty in work. While the highest predictors of absenteeism from the highest to the lowest are: punctual task completion failure, absenteeism style, and no explanation absence. The study is predicted to provide recommendation for schools to promote teacher job satisfaction and suppress their absenteeism rate. Providing comfort and creating positive working atmosphere for teachers either has significant consequence to endeavor job satisfaction promotion and absenteeism rate decrease. Besides, leaders and school management board assertiveness in the mechanism of decreasing absenteeism is unarguably decisive to create fairness in policy and procedure obedience.

With the ongoing challenges of COVID-19, global economies continue to face uncertainties, widespread workforce volatility and employment challenges. During a sustained crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, university students' self-perceptions about their employability and future career choices in their chosen industry sectors may be affected. Therefore, this study investigates graduate employability concerns and the perceptions of undergraduate students regarding employment prospects and future job security confidence in their disciplines' industry sectors in light of this global crisis. Through the employment of a mixed methods design, the study investigates the perceptions of graduating students from three disciplines in Singapore: Tourism, Communications and Information Technology. The findings indicate that COVID-19 had a positive impact on perceptions of jobs that could be performed from home and those in essential services. Concurrently, there were notable variances in the students' perceptions regarding career prospects and job security confidence across the three disciplines with regard to the impact of the crisis on their industry sectors in general and themselves individually.

The gig economy is rapidly transforming service-based industries, including online teaching. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of people worldwide to work remotely, gig economy teaching generated billions of dollars in revenue and was responsible for millions of lessons per month. Although the global labor market is currently experiencing a major shift because of the gig economy, applied linguists have paid little attention to gig-based work and its implications. The current study narrows this research gap by using self-branding theories to understand the ways in which gig economy teachers market themselves to potential students. The findings, which are based on 100 teacher profiles, reveal that teachers adopt four self-branding discourses when marketing their teaching services. These self-branding discourses may vary according to the teacher's country of origin, professional qualifications, and first language background. The study argues that self-branding discourses reflect a larger, and perhaps more problematic, global trend in which individual workers directly compete against each other in a race to lower earnings and job security.

This research investigates the attitudes, working conditions, experiences, and job satisfaction of academic staff employed at offshore campuses. An online survey questionnaire was completed by 72 academic staff in 10 different countries, which included China, Malaysia, Qatar, the UAE, and Vietnam. It was found that the desire for adventure and travel, and to experience a foreign culture, were the most popular motivations for working at an offshore campus. Common challenges and disadvantages of teaching at an offshore campus are the lack of job security, support for research, academic freedom, and opportunities for development and advancement. However, such academics often have motivated students, smaller class sizes, greater autonomy at work, fewer meetings, higher disposable income, and less of the 'publish or perish' culture. Almost three-quarters of our research participants believe that it is possible to have an attractive career teaching in transnational education, at offshore campuses.

Most of the instructional workforce within the humanities in countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and The Netherlands comprises non-tenure track appointments. This commentary is a starting point in thinking about what the meaning and consequences are of far-reaching casualization for humanities education. Based on my experience as a supervisor of non-tenured early-career teachers in the humanities and on an international exploration of the position of the so-called precariat, I describe the competing, and perhaps irreconcilable, discourses on the importance of the humanities for society and the labour market which these non-tenured teachers must navigate. These discourses put especially non-tenured academics, who are themselves in a very precarious, in an even more disempowered space that is not only detrimental to these non-tenured teachers but also to the students who must learn to deal with perceived job insecurity.

This article explores the relationship between unionization and academic freedom protections for sessional faculty in Ontario universities. Specifically, we compare university policies and contract provisions with a view to determining whether unionized sessionals hired on a per-course basis have stronger academic freedom protections than their non-union counterparts. We then explore whether particular kinds of bargaining unit structures are more conducive to achieving stronger academic freedom provisions. Finally, we consider whether academic freedom can be exercised effectively by sessionals, whether unionized or not. We conclude that unionization does help to produce stronger academic freedom protections for sessional faculty and that faculty association bargaining unit structures are most likely to help deliver this outcome. We further conclude that academic freedom is difficult to exercise for sessional faculty, regardless of union status, but that unionization offers greater protections for sessionals facing repercussions as a result of asserting their academic freedom.

The attacks on university staff and students engaged in teaching, researching and speaking out against the state, military and religious powers, and for fairness, democracy, and equality, are increasing. As has been noted by many academics and commentators, liberal democratic principles of free speech and movement, alongside academic freedom, are very much a battle ground in the 21st century. Free movement of academics and students around the world is critical to freedom, of thought and action. Academic freedom is a responsibility, not a right. It is to speak truth to power; to honour the liberal university goal of working for the public good; and for the publicly funded university, in particular, to act in the public interest. What then is stopping Australian universities from speaking truth to power today? Why are Australian universities so quiet in comparison with students, staff and even university leaderships in many other places? This article discusses three big and intertwined obstacles to the exercise of academic freedom in Australian universities today which are not unique to Australia but are often overlooked in focussing on the bigger human and professional rights picture. These are: (1) insecure employment; (2) unreliable funding; and (3) pressure in partnerships.

The Higher Education sector has been through an array of changes, such as globalisation, massification, lack of job security, decolonisation and a number of technological advancements. These changes have impacted academic workload and have increased work pressure with resultant effects on family and work life balance. A review of the existing literature indicates a lack of clarity when it comes to the job demands and job resources inherent to the academic occupation. In order to determine the job demands and job resources of academics, a systematic review of empirical literature is warranted. This paper systematically reviewed empirical research published from 2014 to 2019 investigating job demands and resources based on the job demands-resources model in the higher education environment. Six articles were identified that met the criteria for inclusion. Thus, a list of quantitative, qualitative and organisational job demands as well as organisational and personal resources specific to the academic environment were identified. This will allow Higher Education Institutions to provide targeted development of job resources and mitigation of job demands for their academic employees and enable the development of specific interventions.

Although recent research looked at the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model among academicians, there is still lacking an adequate account for their technology adoption intentions and behaviors in the face of the COVID-19 virus. This study applies the conservation of resource (COR) theory to ground the statistical results investigating the moderation and moderated mediation effects of COVID-19 anxiety in relation to the UTAUT model. According to the COR theory, anxiety linked with the COVID-19 pandemic endangers resources such as human connections (death of friends and relatives), job security and finances, as well as physical health and psychological well-being. Since resource loss is more salient according to COR theory, academicians are more willing to employ technologies like Zoom, MS Teams, and Google Classroom since the COVID-19 threat is existential and the resource loss is eminent. To test the theory, data was collected through an anonymous survey during the months of December 2020 and January 2021. The resultant data from 215 academicians was analyzed using Hayes Process Macro in SPSS. COVID-19 Anxiety positive moderates both the direct effects of Performance Expectance-Behavior Intention and the mediating Performance Expectance-Behavior Intension-Usage relationships. Similar results were seen for other predictors, albeit the moderated mediations for Effort Expectancy and Facilitating Conditions were not significant. These findings overwhelmingly corroborate the claims that COR theory more comprehensively explains the effects of COVID-19 anxiety among academicians in relation to the UTAUT model.

This study captured experiences of MSW and BSW students during COVID-19 across a number of life domains (i.e., class, field, personal coping and well-being, homelife, and employment). An electronic survey was administered, with a sample size of 65 students from two universities. Descriptive and bivariate analyses were conducted. A majority of students reported trouble staying focused on coursework and maintaining a routine but appreciated faculty flexibility and a sense of connection. A majority reported mental health concerns made worse by COVID-19. Increased caregiving responsibilities for family members and children was a stressor, as well as worry about jobs and licensure postgraduation. Key areas for educator and program self-reflection are offered based on study findings.