Vocational education and training - VET

Introduction: Africa does not have enough doctors despite having the highest continental burden of disease. Encouragingly, many new medical schools are opening and have begun to graduate doctors. However, the educational structures, operations, and policies of these schools remain poorly understood. This study aimed to better understand these dimensions of new medical schools on the continent.

Methodology: We developed and implemented an online survey covering topics that included admissions policies, curricular design, assessment, accreditation, faculty development, research capacity, postgraduate training, and COVID-19-specific challenges. The survey was sent to 130 schools of which 52 represented individually identifiable email addresses (the remainder being schools’ websites or generic addresses).

Results: Responses represented 10 countries (response rate ~ 56%). Curricula were mostly lecture-based (n = 18, 75%). Electronic platforms and information technologies were used by over 75% (n = 18) of schools. More than half have not implemented postgraduate training programs (n = 13, 57%). Most schools had a formal accreditation process (n = 16, 70%), but the source of accreditation varied. The biggest challenge facing schools was financial (n = 20, 87%) followed by faculty/staff recruitment, training, and retention (each n = 15, 65%).

Conclusion: New medical schools in Sub-Saharan Africa are a gateway to the next generation of medical doctors in a region where medical professionals are desperately needed. This survey of new schools is an important step in better understanding their status and needs, especially with the onset of the pandemic.

Medical AI has transformed modern medicine and created a new environment for future doctors. However, medical education has failed to keep pace with these advances, and it is essential to provide systematic education on medical AI to current medical undergraduate and postgraduate students. To address this issue, our study utilized the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology model to identify key factors that influence the acceptance and intention to use medical AI. We collected data from 1,243 undergraduate and postgraduate students from 13 universities and 33 hospitals, and 54.3% reported prior experience using medical AI. Our findings indicated that medical postgraduate students have a higher level of awareness in using medical AI than undergraduate students. The intention to use medical AI is positively associated with factors such as performance expectancy, habit, hedonic motivation, and trust. Therefore, future medical education should prioritize promoting students’ performance in training, and courses should be designed to be both easy to learn and engaging, ensuring that students are equipped with the necessary skills to succeed in their future medical careers.

In understanding the role and potential of ChatGPT in education, this article suggests that ChatGPT has the potential to enhance the education system by providing instant feedback, personalised learning experiences and 24/7 availability. Furthermore, it aims to analyse the different perspectives on ChatGPT and establish a research foundation that contributes to future research, for instance, questions around who is responsible for the content generated by ChatGPT, and how it should be used to assess student learning. The article offers valuable insights for both students and educators looking to understand the role of ChatGPT in education and the future of the education system. It provides the starting point for further discussion and research into the role of ChatGPT in education and the potential it holds to revolutionise the way we learn and teach. The article concludes by calling for further research to fully understand the impact of ChatGPT on education and to determine the most effective ways to integrate it into the classroom.

Background
As Ukraine struggles with the education of healthcare professionals due to the war, we aimed to identify the specific effects of the war on medical education, the resulting needs, and the expected consequences for schools, faculty, staff, students, and the healthcare system.

Methods
In October and November 2022, we performed a survey of students, faculty, and staff of medical schools in Ukraine and conducted semi-structured interviews with faculty leaders (i.e., rectors, vice-rectors). We conducted a descriptive analysis of the survey’s closed-ended questions. The survey and the interviews included open-ended questions about war-related restrictions to teaching and learning, resulting needs, and expected consequences, for which we applied a thematic analysis.

Results
We received 239 survey responses (N = 49 faculty and staff, N = 190 students) and conducted nine interviews with faculty leaders across Ukraine. Most survey participants indicated that they had experienced restrictions or changes to their work or study due to the war (86% of faculty and staff, 69% of students). From the thematic analysis of the survey and interviews, we identified eight themes: disruption of teaching, increased workload, mental stress, financial restrictions, non-war related needs, international cooperation, quality of education, and prospects of future professionals. The quality of healthcare education in Ukraine was threatened, and schools, faculty, staff, and students were under great strain. While already established international cooperation has been supportive, some needs have still not been addressed.

Conclusions
We hope that our findings will help researchers and educators from abroad contribute to meeting Ukraine’s needs in medical education.

Background
For vocational and professional education to remain relevant, instructors need to keep developing themselves and their practices. Much of instructor learning happens on-the-job. Drawing on literature on teacher learning in the workplace, this article explores how structural and cultural conditions shape professional learning of instructors in departments for post-secondary vocational and professional education in western Canada.

Methods
A multiple case study approach was used to explore how instructors perceive departmental conditions as enhancing or inhibiting professional learning. Interview data, meeting observations, and program documentation was collected from 27 instructors from 5 departments in three institutes for post-secondary vocational and professional education. The educational programming in the five departments cover four industry sectors: two healthcare departments, one building trades, one business, and one social services department.

Results
Structural conditions reported to facilitate instructor professional learning at the department level include student feedback, job-rotation, coordinating work-placements, and whether participation in continuing professional development is a licensing requirement of the profession. Heavy workload and the way teaching is scheduled are most often reported as conditions inhibiting learning. Considering cultural conditions, three in-depth case descriptions illustrate how instructors draw on beliefs and practices prevalent in their original trade/profession when shaping their departmental culture as a learning environment.

Conclusions
The concept of sense-making proved useful to describe how instructors draw on elements of the occupational culture taught in the program when shaping their workplace as a learning environment. This influence of occupational culture could help explain previously observed differences in how instructors from various industry sectors engage in professional learning. Organizational support is warranted for facilitating organizational conditions for instructor learning including the development of departmental leaders’ capacity to influence workplace conditions for professional learning.

The advent of the industrial revolution 4.0 (IR4.0) impacted the national industry and the need to provide a highly skilled and competitive workforce. However, the previous study on the implementation of IR4.0 in vocational colleges in Malaysia is still unsatisfactory. Previous studies have also focused on Technical Education and Vocational Training (TVET) at the higher education. Therefore, this study conducted to explore the challenges towards the implementation of the IR4.0 element in the Vocational College (VC) curriculum. VC offers education skills certificate and diploma level to secondary school students. VC needs to be prepared to face this phenomenon in providing national human resources. The study employs qualitative design using in depth semi structured interview method guided by the interview protocol. Seven participants who met the sampling criteria were involved in this study. The Interview recording systematically managed and translated verbatim as interview transcripts. Then a thematic analysis performed using ATLAS.ti software (version 8) to construct appropriate codes, categories and themes to answer the research questions. The results of the interviews found five main challenges identified on the implementation of the IR4.0 element in the VC curriculum; curriculum review, providing teaching workforce, providing infrastructure, industry relations and engaging in education. Overall findings indicate the need for a revisit of the VC curriculum to implement the IR4.0 element and has implications to implement in providing a national workforce that meets the needs of the industrial demand. This study expected useful to Bahagian Pendidikan dan Latihan Teknikal Vokasional (BPLTV) in strengthening the Vocational Education Transformation agenda through the implementation of VC curriculum revisit by considering the challenges of IR4.0 implementation from various angles discussed to ensure students' knowledge and skills meet IR4.0 requirements to contribute to national development.

AI chatbots have recently fuelled debate regarding education practices in higher education institutions worldwide. Focusing on Generative AI and ChatGPT in particular, our study examines how AI chatbots impact university teachers’ assessment practices, exploring teachers’ perceptions about how ChatGPT performs in response to home examination prompts in undergraduate contexts. University teachers (n = 24) from four different departments in humanities and social sciences participated in Turing Test-inspired experiments, where they blindly assessed student and ChatGPT-written responses to home examination questions. Additionally, we conducted semi-structured interviews in focus groups with the same teachers examining their reflections about the quality of the texts they assessed. Regarding chatbot-generated texts, we found a passing rate range across the cohort (37.5 − 85.7%) and a chatbot-written suspicion range (14–23%). Regarding the student-written texts, we identified patterns of downgrading, suggesting that teachers were more critical when grading student-written texts. Drawing on post-phenomenology and mediation theory, we discuss AI chatbots as a potentially disruptive technology in higher education practices.

Based on a systematic literature review, we demonstrate that college continuing education in Quebec is poorly represented in colleges’ specialized publications and generally absent from the field of educational research, despite its importance in the field of professional and technical training. We first describe the context of adult college education and training in Quebec and demonstrate its significance as a distinct training sector. We then present findings from our exhaustive literature review. Using these results, we show that despite its role in adult education, college continuing education in Quebec remains an unexplored research area. To conclude, we present hypotheses that may explain this lack of visibility and suggest potential research avenues on a subject that merits greater consideration.

Ethical issues in Educational Technology have been scarcely considered in the literature so far and only recently raised more attention. Considering Educational Technology as a research area and an ethical practice, this qualitative study aimed at exploring which and how ethical aspects are considered in Educational Technology training. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight university instructors in education departments with expertise in Educational Technology and/or Distance Education Quebec higher education institutions. The results show that that there are topics clearly more present than others, but some were clearly considered relevant to address in Educational Technology training offerings despite not being so right now. Others are still quite new. Spotlighting practitioners' perspectives about these issues an important contribution of the study.

We evaluate the education and labour impact of vocational education and training (VET). Identification draws on different IVs from the large-scale, staggered introduction of VET courses in public schools in Portugal from 2005. We also exploit the large gender differences in VET, with many courses selected almost only by either boys or girls. Drawing on rich student-school matched panel data, we find that VET increased upper-secondary graduation rates dramatically: our LATE estimates typically exceed 50 percentage points. These effects are even stronger for low-achieving students and welfare recipients. Moreover, we find evidence of regional youth employment growth following VET expansions. VET graduates also benefit from higher wages and other positive outcomes over several years, compared to both academic-track and lower-secondary graduates.

Highlights
•
Vocational educated workers receive higher wages than those with general education.

•
No significant differences by comparing to university graduates in science and engineering with the same years of education.

•
The wage premiums associated to vocational education tend to increase at older ages.

•
Females with tertiary vocational education are more likely to receive a higher long-term wage premium than males.


Abstract
This paper estimates the potential impact of vocational education on wage differentials between vocational and general graduates over the life cycle in Thailand, using the national Labor Force Survey (LFS) from 2017 to 2022. The returns to vocational education are analyzed at three levels of education: upper secondary, diploma, and college. The inverse-probability-weighted regression adjustment (IPWRA) method is implemented to account for non-random assignment in choosing the academic track. The results show, on average, that vocational educated workers receive higher wages than those with general education, but it has no significant differences by comparing to university graduates in science and engineering with the same years of education. Additionally, the wage premiums associated to vocational education tend to increase at older ages. The empirical evidence corroborates the crucial role of vocational education in increasing long-term earnings and the number of technical-skilled workers in the Thai labor market.

Abstract
COVID-19 has brought with it a global crisis, but it also highlighted many important take-home messages to educators that are worth considering and implementing for better future medical education. We highlight 5 of these messages; (1) redefining of what considered being a core in training, (2) better to be prepared for the future challenges of online learning, (3) re-envision faculty development practices, (4) attention shift from stethoscope to microscope, (5) extra-curricular scientific activities should not lag.

The present study attempted to examine the relationship between 21st-century leadership and strategic management of school principals concerning their strategy formulation, implementation, and evaluation. This is with an end-view of preparing actions and activities to help strengthen their leadership skills in the 21st-century era. The study is descriptive-correlational in nature, employing a survey questionnaire responded to by 80 TLE teachers from public secondary schools in Districts II and V of Batangas Province. Quantitative analysis indicated that concerning the 21st-century leadership skills of TLE teachers, they generally agree that their school heads manifest strong advocacy and leadership (3.45) while they strongly agree that they display adult professional core (3.52), continuous improvement of teaching expertise (3.50), and results-oriented team (3.51). In terms of the strategic management of TVET programs during this time of the pandemic, they agree that their school heads employ various strategies for strategy formulation (3.36), strategy implementation (3.40), and strategy evaluation (3.41). Pearson’s R correlation revealed a moderate to very high correlation between strong advocacy and leadership, adult professional core, continuous improvement of teaching expertise, and results-oriented teams with their strategic management of the school heads. It was therefore suggested that school heads explore and initiate actions that will help foster their 21st-century leadership skills as it was found that it is influential in the strategic management of the TVET programs, particularly during this time of global health emergency.

The development of graduates’ employability skills has become one of crucial agenda in today’s educational milieu. One if the strategies is my adding the soft skills components in teaching and learning delivery across curriculum. This agenda includes Technical and Vocational and Education and Training (TVET) academic program which now has become the forefront agenda to spearhead the local skilled workforce for the nation. The research employed a quantitative descriptive and cross-sectional study among vocational college students from diploma programs across field of studies to combat numerous issues related to graduates’ preparedness on entering workforce, particularly on lack of employability skills. The employability skills section of the instrument was adapted from Grant, Malloy, and Murphy (2009) and Sarigoz (2012). The CD-SEI (Career Development Self-Efficacy Inventory) was replicated from Yuen et al. (2005) as dependent variable. Findings related to employability skills were indicated at a moderate level. The self-efficacy for career development was moderately high. Students' self-efficacy for career development was not significantly influenced by the demographic variables of gender or academic success. Additionally, the results indicated that vocational college students have higher cognitive skills which significantly predicted the career development self-efficacy. The results of this study can be capitalized as guidelines to carry out a curriculum that is more industrially driven, contributing the exposure to industrial experiences as self-efficacy and employability skills values before venturing job market.