فصلنامه پژوهش و برنامه ریزی در آموزش عالی
سال بیست و هفتم شماره 3 (پیاپی 101، پاییز 1400)

The issue of this article is questioning the beginning and principal of the university; in particular the question is that in what sense can the beginning of the university in Iran be justified and legitimate? By distinguishing between the beginning and the founding, I have linked the beginning of the university to its end, responsibility. The purpose of this research was to show the legitimacy on the university as a modern phenomenon and to pay attention to the necessity of reasoning and critique in the university situation. The university has a new beginning as a new phenomenon. This new beginning or principal can - and should-be discussed in relation to its teleos, by Gadamer's hermeneutic method and in a phenomenological attitude. For such a discussion, first a description is given on the concept of beginning and then, based on the modern experience of the university, that experience is conceptualized. The description of the beginning and the concept of the university are then discussed in the situation of Iran and in relation to the history of the university in Iran. The result of the study is an emphasis on the self-actualization of the academic individual. A university is a place for freedom and responsibility, meaning theorizing and acting to identify and control the evils and anomalies that hinder the realization and formation of self and society. The university is a place for questioning the phenomena of the self, the society and the world. In a sense, given the experience of being a university, the university has been "established" in Iran but has not "begun".

The study of the role of education in controlling scientific misconduct in Iran: using Grounded TheoryScientific misconduct in the most general sense is a deliberate violation of methodical and moral norms with the intention of deceiving others. Falsification, fabrication and plagiarism formally had been considered as the main examples of scientific misconduct by some researchers. In recent years, due to the reports presented, it has become necessary to examine the main misconduct cases and find its causes. It is assumed that at least one of the influential factors among academics should be rooted in the period of education, including higher education. Therefore, in this study, the following question was answered: What is the role of education, elementary education or higher education, in recognizing ethical norms, finding skills in reasoning and motivating researchers to perform ethical practice? to answer the question, the Grounded Theory method was used. In this study in-depth interviews with 15 faculty and students including researchers in ethics and education studies were done. Simultaneously, the obtained data were analyzed with primary, secondary, axial and selective coding and the final model was extracted. The final solution is to strengthen the implicit learning through the teacher-student  face to face relationship in order to transfer the scientific-ethical behaviors, continuous rethinking of the criteria of scientific assessment, and continuous application of the criteria of assessment and the main and valuable subject of assessment and finally strengthening small "ethical environments" in a society that follows the norms of a scientific community including transparency and critique, freedom and differences of individuals.

In recent years, synergistic policies, regulations, and procedures have been developed in higher education that have resulted undesirable outcomes that have led the university to unethical behaviors in the research process. The irregular growth of universities and higher education institutions, changes in regulations of theses and dissertations, paper-based faculties promotion regulations are the drivers of these changes. The purpose of this study was to investigate the externalities and of this metamorphosis in higher education and the effect of these factors on the dynamic life cycle of research and its products, especially scientific papers. For this purpose, the consequences of these strategies were extracted by literature review. So, using the tools of cause-effect loops model in the form of 5 subsystems including:  dominance of poor quality research works, non-practical and similar research, increasing scientific journals and forming power networks around it to publish articles, spread of research misconduct and scientific violations, expanding the market for outsourcing research and ghostwriting and commercializing higher education and changing faculty members' views from a generous to an instrumental view to the students, integrated and final model also included 10 reinforcing loops and 3 balancing loops of the externalities of this change in policies and their interactions have been identified. Finally, with a holistic perspective, an interactive model of the potential externalities was developed.

One of the main goals of a medical education transition program is to estimate the cost of educating a student. The aim of this study was to estimate the final cost of student’s education in the Tabriz School of Management and Medical Informatics. The present study used the Activity Based Costing method (ABC) to calculate the cost of student education in the academic year 2015-16. After identifying and calculating the processes performed in the activity centers, five main groups of costs were identified, including personnel, consumables, building depreciation, equipment depreciation and energy costs. Overhead costs were shared by two direct methods and partial adjustment calculations were done in Excel 2010 in two scenarios without calculating depreciation, and with the calculation of the depreciation. The results showed that the final activity centers spent 67% of costs. The middle centers spent 17% costs and upper centers spent 16% of costs. The cost of personnel costs with 74%, had the highest cost and cost-opportunity with 2.6%, had the lowest share of total cost. In the first scenario, the completed cost of one course was 53 million Rials and the average cost of student education was 104.8 million Rials. In the second scenario, the cost of one course was 50 million Rials and the average cost of student education was 100 million Rails. The use of Activity Based Costing (ABC) system can solve a significant part of the problems of higher education institutions. Due to the high share of personnel costs in total costs, proper planning in the field of recruitment and use of manpower, as well as unused recruitment of some faculty members can bring efficiency and productivity. Cost calculation and analysis should be considered as one of the routine tasks of colleges.

The aim of this study was to explore students’ readiness for e-learning during Covid-19, determining learner satisfaction with online learning experiences and their relations with students’ success. A descriptive-analytical research design and Spearman correlation coefficient were used in this study. Population under study, which was considered as the sample, included students of a course in a post-graduate program in an engineering school at a research university in Iran.  Instruments for measuring the two independent variables were two questionnaires: i) e=Learning Readiness, and ii) User Satisfaction Scale. Furthermore, continuous assessment by the instructor during the teaching-learning process was used a measure of student performance. Findings indicated that there was a strong relationship between students’ readiness for e-learning and student performance (=ρ.89). Furthermore, the correlation between learner satisfaction and performance was also strong ( =.86). Although the sample size in this study was small, due to strong correlation coefficients between independent variables and the dependent variable, the two hypothesis are statistically significant (p≤0.05).  Although, the target population in this study was post-graduate students, the findings may be generalized to undergraduates as well.  Therefore, students' academic success in online courses and their satisfaction with the system affect their preferences for how they learn, self-directed learning, learning habits, ability to work with computer tools, and technological skills. This readiness skill is composed of five factors: 1) self-directed learning; 2) learning preferences; 3) technology skills; 4) Study habits; 5) computer equipment capabilities. These five factors have been already in focus of attention by « Penn State » and some other universities. Based on the results, towards, making e-Learning courses and programs of high quality, there is need for enabling students in the five areas, above-mentioned. However, quality in e-learning, in addition to students’ readiness, requires that academic members are e-teachers and use a continuous assessment of learning during the teaching-learning process. By measuring the usability of e-learning systems, students' satisfaction can be measured and action can be taken to improve it.

The meaning and importance of the curriculum in higher education in connection with the developments of higher education in the social field, has undergone fundamental changes. Hence, the question is how such a situation is represented in the Iranian context? Therefore, the focus of the present study was on the analysis of how to understand the curriculum in Iranian higher education studies using a phenomenological approach. In this context, curriculum studies in Iranian higher education was collected in the last decade by the systematic review method. Using a purposeful sampling technique, 57 articles were selected and qualitatively analyzed in two levels of open and axial coding. As a result, four ways of the understanding curriculum in selected articles, were identified, defined and explained by experimental examples: 1) task-oriented understanding, 2) responsive understanding, 3) project-oriented understanding and 4) learning- research understanding. These ways of understanding were defined and explained by citing empirical examples. The common denominator of the three primary ways is that it dominates the traditional and limited meaning of the curriculum (mechanisms for selecting, organizing and transferring knowledge in a course of study) on the intellectual foundations of curriculum studies in Iranian higher education. Also, the quasi-learning way indicates the dominance of the limited and traditional meaning of the curriculum on the intellectual foundations of the limited number of studies that have studied the curriculum in higher education is based on its broad meaning (the social process of understanding and developing meaningful learning experiences). As a result, understanding the curriculum in Iranian higher education studies is involved in the dogmatism of traditionalism, which can seriously jeopardize its usefulness for the excellence of university education and learning. This study can help to rethink the understanding and intellectual flow of the higher education field of study in order to get out of such an intellectual dogmatism.

Acceptance of virtual educational qualifications by human resources recruitment specialists’ affairs in organizations is one of the important issues. This qualitative study focuses on the views and biases of recruitment experts towards virtual education (online) in comparison with traditional (face-to-face) education. The method of data collection was semi-structured telephone interviews with 18 human resource recruitment specialists in the public sector. The obtained information was coded by theme analysis method and then analyzed to find concepts related to the acceptance of virtual educational documents. The majority of respondents believed that online and traditional education in reputable universities are equally acceptable. Lack of social interactions in online education and the credibility of some particular teaching universities were among the concerns of recruitment specialists. The results showed that attitudes about e-learning are changing towards a more positive one. It is suggested that students in virtual educational classes participate in social activities outside the classroom to compensate for the lack of social interaction in virtual educational classes. Uuniversities with virtual education should also gain or maintain their credibility and seek to increase the credibility of their academic credentials for acceptance among recruitment specialists’ affairs.