Singularity in higher education: Methods for detection and classification

In a complex world, the education field needs to advance learning challenges that generate new dynamics of innovation and promote their detection in order to disseminate them as benchmarks for differentiated teaching.

This topic is what this scientific article is about. This was prepared by Pablo Lara Navarra, Enrique A. Sánchez Pérez, Antonia Ferrer Sapena and Àngels Fitó Bertran, member of the Management and e-Learning (MeL) research group. The article was published in the journal Expert Systems with Applications in 2023.

About the article

Following an empirical investigation of the singular practices that can be found around the world in higher education, the article identified fifty-five centers that could be used to describe the global scenario of innovative initiatives.

They evaluated them by means of a closed description of their properties using sixteen variables organized around three major aspects of the centers’ functioning. Using artificial intelligence techniques, they found that these sixteen variables can be reduced to seven, and found four large groups with well-defined properties.

The study provides two main results

The first is the classification of higher education institutions that carry out singular practices into four groups.

1. Excellence Group (strength in the Organizational Model) (high level).
2. Standard-Singularity Group (medium/low level).
3. High-Singularity Group (strength in the Service Model) (medium/high level).
4. Low-Singularity Group (low level).

The second is the establishment and proposal to redefine the most significant variables among those initially proposed. They are those related to: Design and planning of learning, Evaluation and accreditation model, Learning resources, Agents and roles, Organizational structure, Link with collaborators, and Recipients/Ecosystem. This proposal must be verified and qualified in subsequent studies, both experimental and mathematical.

Conclusion

To conclude, is important to highlight that singularity is not just an abstract theoretical concept. Based on the empirical analysis carried out in the research, it is possible to redefine it and turn it into an operational concept. The adaptation of higher education in a global context of technological and social change must be constant and permanent, and the schools of the future must have adequate instruments that allow them to obtain advice on the direction they should choose in their strategic approaches.

Consult the study

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