A Comparison of Forestry Continuing Education Academic Degree Programs

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Interesting paper. However:

1) Avoid long or vague or complicted sentences (e.g. "A well trained and skilled cadre of forestry professionals is one of the key requirements to make progress with multiple global efforts to assure a synergistic contribution of forests and the forest sector to sustainability goals."). Check once again the whole text for such passages.

2) You talk about "representative sampling" (l. 471). You have to describe the sampling method and to argue about its reliability in the method section.

3) Why did you use only Scopus and Google scholar (l. 209)? Why not, i.e. ISI? It is understandable that not all indexing bases can be used, but at least a basic argumentation about why you selected the particular bases and not other ones and what research strengths or weaknesses this option has.

4) The conclusion should become more specific so as to highlight your most non-trivial findings and enable a reader to cite your paper just being based on the conclusion (or abstract) (most readers have not time to read the whole paper or the discussion).

5) Pose certain limitations and challenges for future research in the conclusion.

Author Response

• Avoid long or vague or complicted sentences (e.g. "A well trained and skilled cadre of forestry professionals is one of the key requirements to make progress with multiple global efforts to assure a synergistic contribution of forests and the forest sector to sustainability goals."). Check once again the whole text for such passages.

Response

We thank the reviewer for the insightful comments. We have carefully gone through the entire text and tried to improve readability, reducing long sentences, and improve other imperfections.

• You talk about "representative sampling" (l. 471). You have to describe the sampling method and to argue about its reliability in the method section.

Response

We also thank the reviewer for this feedback. We have revised the method section to clarify how the sampling was done, and provided information on confidence level and on margin of error.

• Why did you use only Scopus and Google scholar (l. 209)? Why not, i.e. ISI? It is understandable that not all indexing bases can be used, but at least a basic argumentation about why you selected the particular bases and not other ones and what research strengths or weaknesses this option has.

Response

We assume that with ISI the reviewer means Web of Science, which was until recently managed by the Institute of Scientific Information. We did not use this, as it requires subscription, is our understanding. As we pointed out in the paper, it was not intended to undertake a comprehensive literature review on forestry higher education or forestry continuing education, but do a literature search to make sure that we locate our study well in ongoing academic debates. We felt that by using both Scopus, Google Scholar, but also Google, we captured a sufficient amount of the publication that had relevance for our study, which was what we really needed. Until today, we have not ran into publications that we believe we should have included as a reference in the paper.

• The conclusion should become more specific so as to highlight your most non-trivial findings and enable a reader to cite your paper just being based on the conclusion (or abstract) (most readers have not time to read the whole paper or the discussion).

Response

We have revised the conclusions somewhat and tried to make them more specific. We believe that the paper’s highlights, abstract and conclusions convey clear messages, relevant to a readership interested in the topic. We are hesitant to formulate conclusions that are not logically derived from our evidence, but rather opinion.

• Pose certain limitations and challenges for future research in the conclusion.

Response

We have added more detail to what we believe, based on our research findings are relevant future research directions, and what are studies that can be undertaken.

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript presented for review addresses the problem of a comparison of forestry continuing education academic degree programs. This topic is important and interesting. It is important that people working in forestry do not stop at completing studies or other courses, but are aware of the necessity of continuous education. The changing world, the emerging new techniques and arrangements, force continuous education among forest practitioners in order to be "up to date". The authors justify undertaking their research in the summary. The introduction to the manuscript is also exhaustive. Chapter 2 provides an exhaustive description of the forestry higher education and forestry continuing education debates.

I am surprised that the authors present different goals for undertaking research in different places of the manuscript. This confuses and confuses the reader. I believe that the objectives of the work should be clearly defined and presented in one place in the manuscript.

I believe that when searching bibliometric databases, Authors should also search words in the titles and abstracts of scientific articles. 

What questions were asked in the questionnaires?

There is no clear information on how many people answered the questionnaires. It seems that the selected number of people is not representative and does not entitle to draw binding conclusions. 

My impression is that the manuscript focuses more on regular study than on the necessity of continuing education - which is in the title of the manuscript. 

I do not understand why the authors searched bibliometric databases, there is no presentation of the results of these activities.

As I understand it, education provided for adults after they have left the formal education system, consisting typically of short or part-time courses; is a process of constant renewal, development and improvement of general and professional qualifications of an individual, lasting throughout their life.

The authors write about acquiring further academic degrees rather than broadening one's knowledge throughout one's life. I believe that this topic should also be raised. 

Author Response

• The manuscript presented for review addresses the problem of a comparison of forestry continuing education academic degree programs. This topic is important and interesting. It is important that people working in forestry do not stop at completing studies or other courses, but are aware of the necessity of continuous education. The changing world, the emerging new techniques and arrangements, force continuous education among forest practitioners in order to be "up to date". The authors justify undertaking their research in the summary. The introduction to the manuscript is also exhaustive. Chapter 2 provides an exhaustive description of the forestry higher education and forestry continuing education debates.

Response

We thank the reviewer with this constructive feedback

• I am surprised that the authors present different goals for undertaking research in different places of the manuscript. This confuses and confuses the reader. I believe that the objectives of the work should be clearly defined and presented in one place in the manuscript.

Response

Again we thank the reviewer for the comment and agree that there is some confusion in this sense. We have relocated some sections of the paper to assure that information on goals and objectives is placed next to each other.

• I believe that when searching bibliometric databases, Authors should also search words in the titles and abstracts of scientific articles.

Response

We do agree with the reviewer in this respect. It is our understanding that when searching in Scopus, the terms include in the search are located in the title, abstract and keywords of papers in the Scopus database. This is not the case when searching in Google Scholar and Google. However, in our search if a title that came up in Google Scholar or Google appeared possibly to be of interest, we scrutinized the abstract and key words. We also want to clarify that our purpose was not to undertake a comprehensive review of the related literature. We believe that we obtained an adequate overview of what has been written on the topic, read a sufficient amount of papers, and cited those papers in our text, that were relevant for the main argument we made.

• What questions were asked in the questionnaires?

Response

We struggled a little with how much detail we should include in explaining the questionnaires in the paper. We have revised this part in the paper and identified clearer the categories of questions posed in the questionnaires.

• There is no clear information on how many people answered the questionnaires. It seems that the selected number of people is not representative and does not entitle to draw binding conclusions.

Response

We believe the information of how many responses we had to the questionnaires is mentioned in the manuscript on page 6 of the manuscript. We sent questionnaires to 157 students, the full pool of students who had received an ASP fellowship and received 60 responses. A sample size calculator (https://www.questionpro.com/sample-size-calculator/), indicates that this is a 95% confidence level that the sample is representative of the population and that the sample size may have a 10% error. This is now been mentioned in the paper. In the case of the survey for lecturers, that was sent to 76 persons, and we received 20 responses. This is a 20% margin of error, but with a 95% confidence level. That is not as good as we had hoped for. However, we clearly indicate this in the paper, and do not draw any conclusions presenting it as hard truth.

• My impression is that the manuscript focuses more on regular study than on the necessity of continuing education - which is in the title of the manuscript.

Response

We also thank the reviewer for this comment. We reviewed definitions of continuing education and adopted one as our guiding definition in the paper. The programs that we reviewed here do fall within this definition, so with some reason can be identified as continuing education. However, we also do make the point that these programs are not the “typical” continuing education cases, i.e.,  efforts to update or increase knowledge and skills of forestry professionals. The phenomenon of forestry professionals going back to pursuing an academic degree for one or two years to then return to a previous or new job has not been analyzed much jet in the literature on higher forestry education or forestry continuing education. We believe that by referring to this as continuing education academic degree programs, we do signal that this is a relevant phenomenon that deserves further research.

• I do not understand why the authors searched bibliometric databases, there is no presentation of the results of these activities.

Response

We did undertake a literature search to have an idea of what has been written on higher forestry education and forestry continuing education. We have noticed that nowadays reviewers believe it is necessary to describe the process how the search was undertaken, to proof that the citations in the paper were not based on an unsystematic selection of references that served the purpose. However, as mentioned above, we did not intend to undertake a systematic literature review on the two topics.

• As I understand it, education provided for adults after they have left the formal education system, consisting typically of short or part-time courses; is a process of constant renewal, development and improvement of general and professional qualifications of an individual, lasting throughout their life. The authors write about acquiring further academic degrees rather than broadening one's knowledge throughout one's life. I believe that this topic should also be raised.

Response

We once again thank the reviewer for these observations. This comment, we believe, is similar to the one under observation 6. The programs that we review, and especially the Asia based programs, coordinated by APFNet and AFOCO, specifically target forest professionals, i.e. people who have a job in a forestry organization, to improve their knowledge, skills and competencies, and competencies, to return to the same job or a different job but again within a forestry organization. We believe, that while students follow an academic program and obtain a M.Sc. degree, the main objective of these programs is improving knowledge, skills, and competencies. In that sense they are similar to the “regular” continuing education programs. We believe one may argue about how these programs should be referred to. We decided to call them forestry continuing education academic degree programs, to try to capture that they have both elements, continuing education and a forestry higher education degree program. What is interesting to signal is that these programs exist, understand how they operate and how different they are, as we found, and reflect on how they compare to “regular” continuing education programs.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors mostly took into account the comments of the reviewers. However, the strange form of the manuscript is not made in the template of the journal. The manuscript requires editorial improvement: it is not written in accordance with the journal's requirements. Additionally, the citations of the literatures are not correct in many places, and the entire chapter of references. 

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for the comments made. The paper is now in the journal's template. We have gone one more time through the manuscript to address grammar and syntax errors, or other writing deficiencies. We have also once again carefully checked the references and made corrections in the list of references.