Learning media of cylinder head cutting for 2-stroke gasoline motors are still limited. The students usually receive the materials only from lectures while the practices used uncut motorcycle props. Subsequently, the students hardly understand the form and the functions of the components. This study aimed at (1) developing the instructional media of two-stroke gasoline motors to improve the students’ learning outcomes, and (2) analysing the feasibility of the developed instructional media. This study was Research and Development. The subject of this study consisted of the 2nd-semester students of Universitas Muhammadiyah Purworejo in the academic year of 2016/2017. The data collection used a questionnaire and a test. The data were analysed using a descriptive analysis technique. The research results showed (1) the developed instructional media was feasible to be applied as instructional media,  and (2) the data analysis results of the control class and the experiment class reached the mean scores of 75.80 and 83.25 respectively. It means there was a significant difference between students using the developed instructional media and those who did not.

The massification of higher education institutions in Taiwan, typically in universities of science and technology, creates competition for resources and currently threatens foreclosures in Taiwan’s higher education system. To answer this challenge amid global competition among universities, the Ministry of Education (MOE) implemented the World-Class Research University Project, creating the initiative for higher education institutions to quickly gain world-class status with the reasonable belief that strong global visibility would attract much needed international resources to supplement local ones. However, the race for global reputation has created highly stressful environments for faculty members to publish research papers in highly regarded international journals. In highlighting fundamental paradoxes of the system and the rationale behind them, this paper attempts to stimulate a much-needed reflection that might pave the way for rational and empirical efforts to transform higher education in Taiwan. This paper also reveals that the emphasis on speed-up achievement has overwhelmed the original academic missions of higher education and placed academics in a scarcity mindset with quantity drowning essence. The primary mechanism for keeping the current system is the collective inertia that limits academics from breaking out of the mould of habitual approaches. This paper discusses all sorts of findings, reported events, theoretical ideas, and inherent contradictions in relation to Taiwan universities in an attempt to frame the essential background on the problems in terms of scarcity mindset and inertial thinking. Finally, the paper provides some suggested solutions. The reflection in this paper may inspire faculty members in higher technological and vocational education programs to lead school administration and industry development with practical and updated knowledge. It is crucial to revitalising faculty members’ educational enthusiasm through building professional autonomy and self-efficacy.

This study sought an insightful understanding of the effects of social meritocratic capital—an inevitable phenomenon/mechanism whereby individuals receive social recognition, respect, and other benefits due to their monetary achievement—on Southeast Asian migrant workers’ behaviours and their ingrained perceptions through investigating their life stories and inner voices reflecting the factors inducing them to participate in the prostitution world. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was employed to scrutinise the qualitative data collected from a series of in-depth interviews with four Southeast Asian migrant women in Taiwan. This study led to the following conclusions: (1) These migrant workers moved overseas due to their pure and simple intention of pursuing better lives for themselves and their family; (2) The internal factors (family reputation and wellbeing) and external ones (unexpected events and a meritocratic society) simultaneously pulled and pushed them, eventually turning them out of their normal careers; (3) They were stuck in the very depths of an extravagant but vicious world by the shock, even attraction, of “big money” characterising a meritocratic capitalist order; and (4) Innocence and ‘purity’ get lost easily, even unconsciously, in the social context of meritocratic capitalism and wishful rationalisation of questionable behaviours, flouting convention and morality, with self-sacrifice and compensation, and self-rationalisation.