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Keywords: militantisme

Student persistence has long been a major challenge for open universities. Despite the evolution of open education, an overall high student attrition rate remains. This paper examines the changes and trends in factors related to student persistence in open universities. It reviews the empirical studies from the 1970s to the 2010s which reported factors influencing student persistence. The relevant studies were searched from databases, including Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. Among the 108 studies collected, a total of 284 factors influencing student persistence were identified. The factors were categorised into student factors, institutional factors, and environmental factors. Their changes and trends over the years were examined. The results show that student factors were the most frequently studied over the years examined, with the major categories being students’ psychological attributes and outcomes. Institutional factors have been increasingly studied in recent decades, with the design and delivery of programmes and courses being the strongest category. Finally, environmental factors have been decreasingly examined, with factors related to students’ family and work being the two main categories. Based on the results, the implications for developing intervention and retention strategies for student persistence in open universities are discussed.

Keywords: student persistence, retention, attrition, open universities, open and distance education

With the emergence of social software and the advance of web-based technologies, online learning networks provide invaluable opportunities for learning, whether formal or informal. Unlike top-down, instructor-centered, and carefully planned formal learning settings, informal learning networks offer more bottom-up, student-centered participatory but somewhat disorganized learning opportunities for students. This paper presents a research study where graduate students are surveyed in their use of informal and formal learning networks in online courses to understand the interaction between the two and how they impact each other. The findings showed that students and professors use both environments often, to optimize learning but online course design is usually not designed to consider informal experiences of the students. The results and illustrated course design framework may contribute to the discussion of blending informal and formal learning for online learning.

Keywords: formal and informal learning environments, e-learning, instructional design

Using in-class questions is an efficient instructional strategy to keep abreast of the state of student learning in a class. Some studies have found that discussing in-class questions in synchronous learning is helpful. These studies demonstrated that synchronous questions not only provide students with timely feedback, but also allow teachers to change the pedagogy adaptively. However, some studies have also shown negative results of synchronous questions in that students may resist being questioned because of anxiety. Therefore, this paper proposes an idea of showing students funny images in order to reward them for providing correct answers. The effect of connecting questions with funny image rewards was examined by collecting data on student test scores, on facial expressions and on electroencephalogram (EEG) responses elicited using this strategy. The data on students' facial expressions indicated that being presented with funny images for correct answers consistently helps to arouse positive emotions in participants. Also, the data on the EEG responses showed that the participants receiving the rewarded questions demonstrated a trend toward increasing levels of attention and relaxation. However, the results also revealed that significant improvements in test scores were not apparent regardless of whether or not amusing visual stimuli were used. The findings imply that showing funny images as a stimulus enhances students' affective states in student-teacher interactions during online learning activities.

Keywords: positive visual stimuli, in-class question, online learning, synchronous learning platform, funny image

The current rise of cultural studies as a groundbreaking paradigm within the human sciences constitutes, without any doubt, an important medium of re-examination of the “virtual” in this light. To us, this epistemological framework appears, today, to be the one best suited to directly allow for the understanding that the adjective “numérique” is, in itself, neither life-saver, nor modernizer, nor creator – the cutting edge of modernity defining itself in this framework only by the outdatedness of the critical posture which brings to light certain sleeping virtualities of the history of thought, such as the paradoxical semiotic “virtuality” and “materiality” that Saussure and Cassirer left us as a legacy, mediums of understanding our new cultural realities.

Keywords: sémiotique des cultures, virtualité, matérialité, œuvre, herméneutique, semiotics of culture, virtuality, materiality, œuvre, hermeneutic

In January 2015, as part of my post-doctoral research into the autobiographical work of the Brazilian-Israeli filmmaker, David Perlov, I spend a month in Tel Aviv, Israel. I arrive with my family – my parents and my sister – and we rent an apartment. The afternoon of our arrival, a tempest of wind, rain and sand prevents us from leaving the house for a few days. In the confines of the apartment, between family discussions, we follow the television pictures of the latest events. But we can't speak Hebrew. Bemused, faced with pictures of the white storm paralysing the country, we learn about the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, the city we had only just passed through on our way to Israel from Brazil. But we can't understand. Everything, in that situation, became impenetrable : from the television screen to the cityscape through the window giving nothing away.

Keywords: Israël, Tel-Aviv, David Perlov, mémoire, Israël, Tel-Aviv, David Perlov, memory

Libraries have existed for millennia, but today many question their necessity. In an ever more digital and connected world, do we still need places of books in our towns, colleges, or schools? If libraries aren't about books, what are they about? In Expect More: Demanding Better Libraries For Today's Complex World, Lankes walks you through what to expect out of your library. Lankes argues that, to thrive, communities need libraries that go beyond bricks and mortar, and beyond books and literature. We need to expect more out of our libraries. They should be places of learning and advocates for our communities in terms of privacy, intellectual property, and economic development. Expect More is a rallying call to communities to raise the bar, and their expectations, for great libraries.

Keywords: bibliothèques, bibliothéconomie, communauté, apprentissage, innovation, création de connaissances, librairies, librarianship, community, learning, innovation, knowledge creation

Keywords: Loi sur le patrimoine culturel