Marlon Xavier

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya | UOC · eLearn Center (eLC)

High dropout rates in online higher education (OHE) have been a longstanding concern. The Open University of Catalonia (UOC), as a fully online open university, is a representative case of these concerns. However, the literature stresses that the reasons behind student dropout in OHE are complex, multidimensional, and not well understood. Moreover,...

Early dropout in online higher education remains a complex challenge intrinsically linked to stopout behaviour. Time poverty and time-related conflicts seem to be central for these phenomena; however, time issues have seldom been studied from the perspective of learners. This qualitative study explored retrospectively the lived experiences of time...

Online higher education has the potential to offer extra benefits for students with disabilities in comparison with campus-based universities, but it can also cause them some challenges. This case study addresses why students with disabilities choose online studies and how a fully online educational model fits their expectations and needs. Twenty-f...

Student persistence in the first year of studies is a crucial concern in online higher education. Recent accelerated growth in online programs due to the COVID pandemic has increased concerns over higher dropout rates, which are often connected to students’ time challenges—time poverty, juggling multiple commitments, and fitting studies into busy l...

Flexibility is typical of open universities and their e-learning designs. While this constitutes their main attraction, promising learners will be able to study “anytime, anyplace,” this also demands more self-regulation and engagement, a cause for student dropout. This case study explores professors’ experiences of flexibility in e-learning design...

Violence is a social phenomenon, for it exists in specific contexts and is effected in relationships with others, due to socio-economic, political and cultural factors. This study, of a quantitative, qualitative and descriptive nature, aimed to investigate the social representations of violence among 349 students from Florianópolis, Brazil, through...

Online higher education continues to grow, yet its high dropout rates remain a pressing and complex problem. However, there are many different definitions of dropout (and related concepts: attrition, persistence, and retention) in the literature, usually related to a temporal conception, and the issue is controversial. Inconsistent terminology is p...

Dropout represents one of the greatest challenges faced by online higher education. This paper presents an institutional intervention aimed at fostering retention and success of first-year undergraduate students at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), an online and open university, through measures addressing learning design and academic supp...

Online higher education continues to grow, yet its high dropout rates remain a pressing and complex problem. This article presents a scoping review of the recent literature on the theme, focusing on dropout definitions, concepts, and models, study domains and themes, methodological approaches, and findings. A search of relevant databases yielded 13...

This study aimed at identifying motivations, risk behavior and social practices, comparing tattooed and non-tattooed women. 316 women (50% tattooed) were surveyed online, answering questions on sociodemographic data, social practices, motivations, and risk behavior. Data collection strategies included snow-balling, social networks, personal contact...

This theoretical essay analyses critically a metaphor, advanced by Brown and Stenner (2009), for the crises in social psychology and psychology, their objects of study and related philosophical anthropologies: Moby-Dick. In interpreting it symbolically as a myth, we argue that the core question for the crises was the concept of unconscious. Thus we...

Online higher education (OHE) continues to grow, yet its high dropout rates remain a pressing and complex problem. This research aimed at investigating and exploring how first-year, fully online OHE students experienced and managed their time and how it impacted their persistence, stop-out behavior, or withdrawal. Participants were 24 undergraduate...

Objetivo: este estudio buscó investigar las representaciones sociales del vivir con VIH/SIDA, así como las vivencias de prejuicios experimentadas por las personas que conviven con dicha condición. Método: Participaron en el estudio 154 personas que conviven con el VIH/SIDA. Los datos fueron recogidos por medio de entrevistas semi-directivas y somet...

This paper addresses the factor of time in relation to dropout in online higher education (OHE), linking both to fully online models such as UOC's. In OHE, time‐related reasons are the most important factors for dropping‐out; conversely, time management factors emerge as a key issue for continuance intention and re‐enrolment. This paper thus presen...

This chapter discusses the idea that the ImCon may function as a simulacrum of symbolic-religious imaginary—a myth or desacralized religion based on a transcendental, totalizing ideology. Following the logics of total consumerism-capitalism, its colonization and fabrication of signification, imagination, fantasy, and dream imply the fabrication of...

This chapter, introducing the study’s empirical part, presents its findings through the interpretation of night dreams, focusing on which subjective factors or domains appear colonized in them, how consumer culture seems to be criticized by them, and the general effects of colonization that they seem to show in relation to both subjects and culture...

This chapter explores the dreamscapes (the scenarios of the night dreams interpreted in this research: McDonald’s, Disneyland, shopping malls) as dream-worlds of consumption, discussing how they symbolize particular aspects of the ImCon and its typical forms of colonization of culture and subjectivity, in a dialog with the sociological theories of...

This chapter explores the concept of symbolic imaginaries, a psychology of the unconscious and its symbolic and imaginative function, and their relations with subjectivity, based on C. G. Jung’s analytical psychology in an interdisciplinary dialog with different sociological traditions. Social imaginaries are discussed as being historically and cul...

This chapter discusses theoretically the subject of dreams and their relations to the other research subjects. Dreams are understood as important origins of symbolic imaginaries and cultures, and their specific significance and functions for the latter are discussed. Dream is conceptualized as a natural product of the unconscious and its symbolic f...

This chapter, on “Method”, describes the qualitative methodological design employed in this research, which consists in a multiple-case study in which each night dream was a case. From a corpus of more than 1400 night dreams collected from various sources (but mainly volunteered on the internet, as dream series, to non-clinical settings), 16 dreams...

After discussing the methodology employed in this work, the following chapters are dedicated to presenting its proper empirical study. It consists in the application of the theoretical framework developed in Part I to the interpretation and discussion of the empirical material: the night dreams, focusing on how subjectivity appears colonized in the...

This chapter analyzes dreams related to Disneyland, dialoguing with Bryman’s theory on Disneyization. In them, Disney imagery and icons appear as models of subjectivity—as simulacra of archetypal models (e.g., the hero), or mythic images. The effects of identification with them (discussed as participation mystique) appear as infantilization and deh...

This chapter analyzes dreams related to shopping malls, comparing them with the symbolism in the movie Metropolis, ending with a series of dreams from the same person. It shows that dreams can reveal a deep, objective critique of sociocultural reality: the consumerist imaginary engenders a massive colonization of symbolic imaginaries, replacing the...

This chapter discusses the semiotic imaginary of consumerism (ImCon), its logic and characteristics, in comparison with symbolic imaginaries; it is defined as a regime of signification composed of signs as social signifiers and based on imagery and the irrational. The social logics of consumption (consumption of social signification through commodi...

Subjectivity, the Unconscious and Consumerism is a unique and imaginative psycho-sociological exploration of how postmodern, contemporary consumerism invades and colonises human subjectivity. Investigating especially consumerism’s unconscious aspects such as desires, imagination, and fantasy, it engages with an extensive analysis of dreams. The aut...

Abstract This theoretical work discusses consumerism's processes of subjectivation and their psychological consequences. Its regime is studied through its social imaginary and its totalitarian character: the discourse of advertising, as a global hegemon, absorbs all forms of discourse and signification, thereby actualizing capitalism's telos - the...

In this article I offer an overview of my doctoral dissertation, which studied the social imaginary of consumerism, and the psychological subjectivity it produces, through the dream - as both a leitmotif or thematic lens, and the empirical object of research. For such I employed an interdisciplinary exploratory outlook, whose theoretical framework...

In this article I offer an overview of my doctoral dissertation, which studied the social imaginary of consumerism, and the psychological subjectivity it produces, through the dream - as both a leitmotif or thematic lens, and the empirical object of research. For such I employed an interdisciplinary exploratory outlook, whose theoretical framework...

This paper is a report of the preliminary results of a research, part of an international research on organizational capitalism (KO) as a psychosocial risk factor, which aimed at identifying and understanding theoretically the aspects of work changes related to KO that appear in the workers’ (professors, physicians and nurses) dreams and fantasies,...

This paper is a report of the preliminary results of a research, part of an international research on organizational capitalism (KO) as a psychosocial risk factor, which aimed at identifying and understanding theoretically the aspects of work changes related to KO that appear in the workers’ (professors, physicians and nurses) dreams and fantasies,...

This paper have for objective to present considerations as for by one extension project developed on the year of 2006, in a partnership among the running of Psychology from UNESC and the Center of Attention Psicossocial (CAPS II). I tend presupposed the social economy, the project he sought , in conjunction with the users , he constructed an associ...

O presente trabalho é um ensaio de natureza teórica que tece reflexões sobre o fenômeno da violência no mundo contemporâneo a partir da perspectiva dada pela filosofia política de Hannah Arendt. Partindo de sua interpretação de Kant, conectamos a teoria original sobre a violência de Arendt com sua base filosófica, o humanismo. À compreensão mais fi...

This article is a theoretical essay that reflects on the phenomenon of violence in the contemporary world, grounded on the perspective furnished by Hannah Arendt's political philosophy. Starting from her interpretation of Kant, we have connected Arendt's original theory on violence with its philosophical basis, Humanism. To the more philosophical a...

O artigo procura descrever o conceito de religiosidade na psicologia junguiana, conectando-o aos conceitos que embasam e se relacionam com sua especificidade, contextualizando-o de forma breve no panorama científico atual e relacionando-o à prática psicoterapêutica. Para tanto, utiliza as obras de Jung e de autores relacionados com a temática abord...

This study aimed at analysing the relation between the factors of religiosity and problem drinking. For such, a single case study was used, composed by dreams and biographic narratives of the subject, a man in his late fifties. Through this material, we set out to verify how the factors became manifest, both consciously and unconsciously, following...