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This research project investigated practical aspects of teaching older, retired people to use the Internet, with particular emphasis on email. The study was carried out in Melbourne, Australia. This paper deals with the justification for the research, its aims, objectives and mid‐term results. A small number of residents in retirement accommodation, aged 84‐97, have been tutored on a one‐to‐one basis to use email and other computer/Internet applications. Though several endemic hurdles have been experienced, the research shows the benefits of email and ways to overcome some of the problems.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the visibility of learning outcomes within an academic institution permits the re‐imagining of general education as the conscious development in students of expertise that is more general than and perhaps more important than the specific outcomes of any major.

The study of expertise shows that it is a dynamic state; in any field of endeavor, experts learn differently than non‐experts. Likewise the study of students shows similar differences. Consciously developing the ability to learn well contributes greatly to becoming an expert in a specialized field.

The paper finds that explicitly attending to the progressive development of students' abilities to learn, and the application of those abilities in majors, creates a different model for general education.

Enabling explicit institutional attention to learning outcomes changes the assumed context for general education and opens up new possibilities.

Using risk-related data often require a significant amount of upfront work to collect, extract and transform data. In addition, the lack of a consistent data structure hinders the development of tools that can be used with more than one set of data. The purpose of this paper is to report on an effort to solve these problems through the development of extensible, internally consistent schemas for risk-related data.

The consortia coordinated their efforts so the hazard, exposure and vulnerability schemas are compatible. Hazard data can be provided as either event footprints or stochastic catalogs. Exposure classes include buildings, infrastructure, agriculture, livestock, forestry and socio-economic data. The vulnerability component includes fragility and vulnerability functions and indicators for physical and social vulnerability. The schemas also provide the ability to define uncertainties and allow the scoring of vulnerability data for relevance and quality.

As a proof of concept, the schemas were populated with data for Tanzania and with exposure data for several other countries.

The data schema and data exploration tool are open source and, if widely accepted, could become widely used by practitioners.

A single set of hazard, exposure and vulnerability schemas will not fit all purposes. Tools will be needed to transform the data into other formats.

This paper describes extensible, internally consistent, multi-hazard, exposure and vulnerability schemas that can be used to store disaster risk-related data and a data exploration tool that promotes data discovery and use.

This paper aims to explore the interrelationship between the fields of education and workforce in the context of post‐industrial societies. It seeks to analyze key challenges associated with the match (and mismatch) of skill supply and demand between education and the work force.

Using a “purposeful sample”, the study provides an evidence‐based analysis that explores how and to what extent soft skills are currently required by world recognized organizations such as Greenpeace, World Bank, OECD, Google, Apple and Samsung.

After a revision of different perspectives to identify and categorize the key skills of the twenty‐first century, the study describes seven non‐technical cognitive and social key skills called soft skills for innovation.

After exploring a small sample size of five recent job vacancies promoted by six major international organizations, the study analyzes the current demand for soft skills for innovation such as, collaboration, critical thinking, contextual learning, searching, synthesizing and disseminating information, communication, self‐direction and creativity. The methodology adopted and the data retrieval process can be replicated with either a larger sample or more focused workforce sectors.

The described “skills mismatch” emphasizes the importance of creating different strategies and tools that facilitate the recognition of skills acquired independently of educational contexts.

This study contributes to the current and ongoing discussions regarding relevant key soft skills for graduates and future employees providing an updated idea of skills demanded by world class organizations.

The paper provides evidence‐based information (data available online) that can contribute to rethinking curriculums and exploring “blended” models that mix real life and teaching contexts stimulating the development of soft skills for innovation.

The debate about in equality has concentrated on trade and/or technology as potential explanations. This paper argues that openness or globalisation in general, instead of the narrow definition of trade, is an important component missing from the discussion about in equality trends. To be specific, openness allows firms to increase their fallback position by presenting a credible threat of relocation. Firms do not have to actually relocate; they just have to present a credible threat to undermine worker’s welfare. This area of research, currently underdeveloped, could potentially improve our discussion about in equality.

In this paper, we develop a simple model of the signaling value of the General Educational Development certificate (GED) credential. The model illustrates necessary assumptions for a difference-in-differences estimator that uses a change in the GED passing standard to yield unbiased estimates of the signaling value of the GED for marginal passers. We apply the model to the national 1997 passing standard increase, which affected GED test takers in Texas. We utilize unique data from the Texas Schools Micro Data Panel (TSMP) that contain demographic and GED test score information from the Texas Education Agency linked to pre- and post-test-taking Unemployment Insurance quarterly wage records from the Texas Workforce Commission. Comparing Texas dropouts who acquired a GED before the passing standard was raised in 1997 to dropouts with the same test scores who failed the GED exams after the passing standard hike, we find no evidence of a positive GED signaling effect on earnings. However, we find some evidence suggesting that our finding may be due to the low GED passing threshold that existed in Texas for an extended period.

This paper investigates, theoretically and empirically, differences between blacks and whites in the United States concerning the intergenerational transmission of occupational skills and the effects on sons’ earnings. The father–son skill correlation is measured by the correlation coefficient (or cosine of the angle) between the father’s skill vector and the son’s skill vector. The skill vector comprises an individual’s occupational characteristics from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT). According to data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), white sons earn higher wages in occupations that require skills similar to those of their fathers, whereas black sons in such circumstances incur a wage loss. A large portion of the racial wage gap is explained by the father–son skill correlation. However, a significant unexplained racial wage gap remains at the lower tail of the wage distribution.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic certainly exacerbated the teacher shortage in the United States for all racial/ethnic groups, but especially for Black teachers. Black teachers account for 7–8% of the total teacher population and this percentage is the direct result of decades of systemic and structural barriers set against Black teachers in the form of racism. Still, Black teachers who enter the profession do so with the willingness to support all students and uplift Black students who often go years without seeing a teacher that looks like them. Black teachers often face different expectations than their white counterparts and these expectations, without the proper support, lead to Black teachers burning out at higher rates. In an effort to understand Black teachers' and the experiences that contribute them remaining in the classroom, the researchers explored Black teachers' working conditions through a phenomenological approach. The findings of this study suggest that Black teachers deserve working conditions that nurture who they are culturally and professionally, that reject actions of oppression toward them – both implicitly and explicitly, and offer spaces for Black teachers to be authentically heard.