Academic institution | EPFL Graph Search

Academic institution is an educational institution dedicated to education and research, which grants academic degrees. See also academy and university. Types

Primary schools – (from French école primaire) institutions where children receive the first stage of compulsory education known as primary or elementary education. Primary school is the preferred term in the United Kingdom and many Commonwealth Nations, and in most publications of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In some countries, and especially in North America, the term elementary school is preferred. Children generally attend primary school from around the age of four or five until the age of eleven or twelve.
Secondary schools – institutions where the final stage of compulsory schooling, known as secondary education, takes place. It follows on from primary or elementary education. There are many different types of secondary school and the terminology used vari

Educational Development Practices in Switzerland or Conquering the Swiss Alps of Higher Education

Steve Bennoun, Ingrid Le Duc

This paper presents the preliminary results of a survey on faculty development practices in Switzerland. A sample of 40 faculty developers contacted though the Swiss Faculty Development Network replied to a set of 35 questions between March and May 2016. The survey identified the 12 core activities they consider to carry out in their role as faculty developers from which: teacher training, personal or small-group advising and curriculum development. The main goal of the survey was to explore if the choice of core activities thereby mentioned could be driven by the faculty developer’s training more than by the type of institution in which they work, of which Universities, Polytechnics and Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS). The main findings show that there is a significant difference of practices between the Universities/ Polytechnics on one side and UAS on the other side. For instance, conducting teacher training programmes and personal advising are the most often mentioned activities for the former; whereas administrative tasks are the front line activities for the latter. Surprisingly, curriculum development is seldom mentioned at all for UAS, although it is understood as a central role of faculty development. This paper will suggests that the altering use of change tactics (Gibbs; 2013) in Faculty Development in the Swiss Higher Education landscape is underlined by elements concomitant to each academic institution -such as class size, institutional educational strategies or even students’ academic freedom.

2016

Three essays on university-industry technology transfer and the economics of science

Annamaria Conti

In the first chapter of this thesis, coauthored with Patrick Gaulé, we reexamine the widely held belief, known as the "European Paradox", that while European academic institutions are good at producing academic research outputs, they lag behind US academic institution when it comes to transfer these outputs to the economy. Using new survey data and controlling for standard factors affecting the productivity of Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs), we find that European TTOs do not execute less licenses than US TTOs. However, they earn significantly less revenue from licenses. We relate the difference in licensing income to differences in the organization and staffing of TTOs. Specifically, US TTOs employ more staff with experience in industry and appear to have greater flexibility in managing their budget. In the second chapter, we examine a policy regime allowing academic institutions to grant industry the intellectual property rights (IPRs) over invention resulting from collaborations. For projects that are close to the market, where a firm plays an important role in generating an invention, the researcher offers the IPRs to the firm, as an incentive to collaborate. However, he retains certain domains where he can exploit an invention without having to apply for a license. The choice of these domains involves a tradeoff. In fact, the researcher either induces the firm's effort, by assigning a broad field of use, or he ensures that he can use an invention in other applications, by granting a narrow field of use. The reverse occurs for projects that are close to the researcher's laboratory, where it is the researcher who plays an important role in generating an invention. The main difference, however, is that if effort were contractible, the firm could reward the researcher for supplying the first best level of effort, because, unlike the researcher, it is not cash constrained. An empirical analysis, based on École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne research contracts, supports the role of broad fields in bolstering a firm's effort, in projects that are close to the market. The third chapter analyzes the extent of state dependence in obtaining basic and applied science grants and the impact of receiving a grant of one type on the probability of being awarded one of the other type in the future. For this purpose, we used a sample of grants for basic and applied research purposes awarded to academic researchers at the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology. We find that, having controlled for unobserved heterogeneity, there is persistence in obtaining both basic and applied science grants. Moreover, the impact of having obtained, in the past, only grants of one type on the number of grants of the other type awarded to a researcher is not significantly different from the impact of not having received any grant.

EPFL2009

Three essays on university-industry technology transfer and the economics of science

Annamaria Conti

EPFL2009