Higher Education
Essays

¶ … era of high-stakes testing in the nation's high schools and calls for increased accountability on the part of educators, the need for identifying what works best in improving academic outcomes has never been greater.

The Relationship between Affirmative Action, Diversity, and Social Justice

Rosabeth Kanter and Change Management: Teach the Elephant to Dance or Eat it One Bite at a Time?

International distance education predated the technological advances that make distance education more widely available to more people than ever before. A potent symbol of globalization, distance education has minimized…

Education -- Psychological Effects of Delayed Promotion

Life for women in the 1950's was certainly different from life today in many arenas including political, social, and economic, however, while women in the 1950's were expected to be the epitome of the domestic…

The way training is delivered in a corporate environment has a tremendous effect on results. This study investigates the role of culture in the learning styles of adult French and American students enrolled in online training programs at an international university. Using Kolb's learning style inventory, the learning style preferences of respondents in both cultural groups will be classified as divergers, convergers, accommodators, and assimilators, reflecting their general tendencies toward learning environments as conceptualized by Kolb (1985). The assumption is that Americans prefer to learn from action-oriented methods and are more comfortable learning from activities that are not job related, such as role plays and games, than do their French counterparts who prefer to learn from job-related activities based on solid research. These preferences will then be examined in light of learners' responses to Hofstede's Culture in the Workplace questionnaire, which examines cultural tendencies towards collectivism/individualism, power orientation, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and long/short term orientation (Hofstede, 1980). The sample population will be composed of 150 American and 150 French trainees. They are all employed in multinationals and hold jobs that require them to attend corporate training and travel around the world. Conclusions will be drawn which compare French and American cultural differences in learning style preferences and the extent to which these preferences are mediated by cultural orientations as conceptualized by Hofstede (1980). Results will assist multinational corporations in understanding the role of culture in their training scenarios as they seek to provide more effective training for their increasingly cultural diverse learner populations which can provide some proof that they will be successful in using the new skills.

An internal business report concluding that: (1) When tuition reimbursement programs are properly designed and managed, they can provide substantial return on investment for employing organizations, by improving skill levels, external ambassadorship, and upward mobility within organizations while simultaneously increasing recruiting success and retention rates; and (2) when they are improperly designed and managed, they become unnecessary additions to overhead without benefit and they can actually increase employee turnover instead of increasing retention.

PRIVATIZATION of the PRISON SYSTEM and the IMPACT of the DIFFERENTIATION of SENTENCING in POWDER vs. CRACK COCAINE OFFENSE and the IMPACT on African-American OFFENDERS

Downsizing has become a favored method that is being used to improve efficiency in many organizations today. It seems that downsizing has become the norm rather than the exception when organizations are in trouble.