Fernando Padró
University of Southern Queensland, Global Learning Division, Faculty Member
- Higher Education, Higher Education Policy, Higher Education Studies, Globalization And Higher Education, Teaching and Learning, Education, and 7 moreTeacher Education, Science Education, Mathematics Education, Public Administration, Educational Psychology, Adult Education, and Quality assurance in Higher Educationedit
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Benchmarking by higher education institutions (HEIs) has been evolving for some time in Australia and New Zealand. Earlier efforts were focused on improving reputation, but now benchmarking has become a required component of higher... more
Benchmarking by higher education institutions (HEIs) has been evolving for some time in Australia and New Zealand. Earlier efforts were focused on improving reputation, but now benchmarking has become a required component of higher education quality assurance, or regulatory compliance schemes. ACODE's benchmarking framework and the ACODE Benchmarks provide Australasian HEIs with the ability to review their technology enhanced learning (TEL) practices and decision-making against what is considered “good” practice. The ACODE benchmarking framework and its benchmarks also allow HEIs to inform quality audit, or regulatory compliance reporting by HEIs to maintain institutional recognition and demonstrate performance against threshold or other specific performance standards. ACODE's benchmarking framework and benchmarks are recognized as influencers in benchmarking practice. However, there is a need to generate empirical data to demonstrate its leadership role and review the bench...
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The Swiss Alpine Tourism Industry is facing enormous challenges. The major challenge comes from exponentially increasing regional competition (from other parts of Europe) due to the rise of the low-cost carriers in Europe. The increased... more
The Swiss Alpine Tourism Industry is facing enormous challenges. The major challenge comes from exponentially increasing regional competition (from other parts of Europe) due to the rise of the low-cost carriers in Europe. The increased competition exposes the problem that the value chain at Swiss Alpine tourism destinations is highly fragmented. Collective action is needed for individual success; however, because stakeholder needs and demands often are heterogeneous, stakeholders in the Industry tend to be hard to manage based on its structural idiosyncrasies. Local tourist organisations (LTOs) that act as the central node at a destination effectively have to balance two conflicting goals, [1] increasing the number of tourists visiting the destination (arrivals) and [2] fostering stakeholder collaboration. Destination management strategies that only focus on maximizing arrivals often produce considerable external costs and generate wealth for a limited number of stakeholders. These...
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This presentation explores the impact of a bridging tool, which seamlessly connects academic learning, student learning skills development support, analytics and ICT spaces, on student learning and the overall student experience.
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This is a quick discussion of the methodological issues surrounding benchmarking that influenced and continues to influence the ACODE Benchmarking Summit. This is a quick primer on benchmarking in general – pros and cons -- and how... more
This is a quick discussion of the methodological issues surrounding benchmarking that influenced and continues to influence the ACODE Benchmarking Summit. This is a quick primer on benchmarking in general – pros and cons -- and how different benchmarking praactices infulence the ACODE Benchmarking Rounds basic benchmarking approach plus future considerations for ACODE related benchmarking activities at the Association and institutional levels.
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Co-curricular learning programs are constantly at-risk of being culled or reduced during times of tight budgeting. Data from programs demonstrating even small impacts enable better understanding of university students’ experiences. The... more
Co-curricular learning programs are constantly at-risk of being culled or reduced during times of tight budgeting. Data from programs demonstrating even small impacts enable better understanding of university students’ experiences. The focus of the study is to explore the impact of co-curricular learning programs or activities on student success at a regional Australian university. Co-curricular learning programs are constantly challenged as they are often the first to be culled or reduced, particularly, in times of economic downturn or tight budgeting. This article reports on a multiple case study approach that uses both quantitative and qualitative data to explore the extent of and relationships among a number of co-curricular learning offerings, provided by a centralised University Learning and Teaching Unit, on student success. The study explores a number of student success outcomes as defined in the risk assessment framework of the newly established Australian regulatory body, ...
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According to Statement 16 of the 2009 World Conference on Higher Education in Paris, “greater emphasis on the areas of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), as well as social and human sciences, is vital for all our... more
According to Statement 16 of the 2009 World Conference on Higher Education in Paris, “greater emphasis on the areas of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), as well as social and human sciences, is vital for all our societies.” Access to programs of study in these areas is considered important for enhancing the quality-of-life experience for individuals by providing skills that translate to technological-capacity nation building, one of the keys to success in a global economy secured by knowledge-based industries. The driving premise—as mentioned in the 1998 “World Declaration on Higher Education for the 21 Century”—is the need to advance knowledge through research. Specifically: • The intellectual and cultural rights on the results of research should be used to the benefit of humanity and should be protected so that they cannot be abused (Art. 5(b)). • Of special importance is the enhancement of research capacities in higher education research institutions, as mutual en...
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A quality education is one that focuses on the whole child-the social, emotional, mental, physical, and cognitive development of each student regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or geographic location. It prepares... more
A quality education is one that focuses on the whole child-the social, emotional, mental, physical, and cognitive development of each student regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or geographic location. It prepares the child for life, not just for testing. It is believed that education leads to empowerment: a process of strengthening individuals, organisations and communities so they get more control over their own situations and environments. Quality education is a crucial factor in combating poverty and inequality in society. Teachers are at the heart of quality education. Schools should have a sufficient number of trained teachers, receiving good quality pre-service and in-service training with built-in components on gender sensitivity, non-discrimination, and human rights. All teachers should be paid domestically competitive salaries. Quality determines how much and how well children learn and the extent to which their education translates into a range of personal, social and developmental benefits. It is the teaching and learning process that brings the curriculum to life, which determines what, happens in the classroom and subsequently the quality of the learning outcomes.
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The antecedent points of reference that shape methodological decisions What does the unit (and its staff) need & want? What is the context for the evidence – what needs to be provided and what type of interpretation is needed? What... more
The antecedent points of reference that shape methodological decisions What does the unit (and its staff) need & want? What is the context for the evidence – what needs to be provided and what type of interpretation is needed? What assumptions does the unit (and its staff )have? What are the assumptions of students, academic staff, senior leaders and other external stakeholders hold about the unit and its programs? What is the theoretical grounding of the unit’s practice? How consistent is it with the rest of the institution’s mindset? What is practical given internal expectations, regulatory compliance requirements, timelines and resource limitations? What USQ’s SDS has accomplished and next steps in the learning analytics saga
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Volumes discussing the functions and roles of professional staff at higher education institutions (HEIs) are rare. HEIs are complex and highly specialized organizations based on performing a variety of tasks within the university or... more
Volumes discussing the functions and roles of professional staff at higher education institutions (HEIs) are rare. HEIs are complex and highly specialized organizations based on performing a variety of tasks within the university or similar institution of higher. This diversity makes a discussion about professional staff challenging; yet, as an aggregate group, they are essential to ensure the effective and efficient running of a campus. The difficulty comes from not being able to talk about them from a system-level integrative and unified perspective learning
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What is the purpose of postgraduate higher education in today’s world? Massification has made these degrees more available in industrialized countries as part of a paradigm shift within the knowledge society.Masters and doctoral degrees... more
What is the purpose of postgraduate higher education in today’s world? Massification has made these degrees more available in industrialized countries as part of a paradigm shift within the knowledge society.Masters and doctoral degrees have traditionally been part of what Maturana and Valera (1980) and later Luhmann (1995) indicated as part of organizational reproduction (autopoiesis). In an era of reduced government funding and rising operational costs, fewer academic positions – especially full-time academic positions – are available as academic retire. On the other hand, the socioeconomic need to increase national and personal intellectual capital in a knowledge-driven world does provide impetus for these higher degrees to meet job flow (“the gross creation and destruction of jobs, reflecting the expansion and contraction of establishments”–Burgesset al. 2000, p. 474) demands in the economy
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Many university programs are under pressure to create an analytics-based evidence culture to demonstrate performance excellence and justify their continued existence. How and where to begin are questions often asked by programs feeling... more
Many university programs are under pressure to create an analytics-based evidence culture to demonstrate performance excellence and justify their continued existence. How and where to begin are questions often asked by programs feeling that they have little data (or the right kind of data). The temptation is to work through methodological issues first; however, as experience at one Australian regional university demonstrated, this is the wrong place to start. A better place to start is knowing what the program is and what it is about and then placing this understanding in the broader context of university and sector regulatory compliance requirements and expectations. Presented here are the questions that were asked and a summary of achievements showing the student learning and development assistance portfolio in a central Learning and Teaching unit was heading in the right direction.
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The author describes the potential benefits of including a social responsibility component based on the ISO 26000 standard in educational leader preparation programs.
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One of the metaphors often used in the discussion of STEM education is that of a pipeline that begins in primary school and ends in the workforce. When looking at STEM occupations, what vexes employers and policy makers is that we cannot... more
One of the metaphors often used in the discussion of STEM education is that of a pipeline that begins in primary school and ends in the workforce. When looking at STEM occupations, what vexes employers and policy makers is that we cannot seem to get enough students, particularly at the primary and secondary levels, interested in pursuing careers in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in order to meet the increasing demand for these occupations, especially when it comes to getting women and individuals from traditionally underrepresented populations. One noteworthy example of this concern can be found in UCLA's The Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) annual survey of incoming freshmen, which shows that the number of college freshmen wanting to major in STEM fields seems to be dropping in areas not related to health and medicine.
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Whether a person is what Boiral and Roy (2007) call a quality enthusiast or a dissident, the decision to become one or the other rests with perceived expectations based on regulatory compliance or, more realistically, his or her own view... more
Whether a person is what Boiral and Roy (2007) call a quality enthusiast or a dissident, the decision to become one or the other rests with perceived expectations based on regulatory compliance or, more realistically, his or her own view of what quality is in a college or university environment. To paraphrase Quinn (2005), QAHE seeks to move the narrative of quality from a normal state to a fundamental state in which the conversation moves from what one 'knows' to venturing beyond familiar territory, based on one's values, learning from this environment, and recognizing when there is a need for change in a world environment in which accountability expectations for higher education institutions and systems continue to grow because of perceived deficits (Dill & Beerkens, 2010), quality is based on policy steering (Padro, 2009; Dill & Beerkens, 2010). Quality assurance often is posited as part of a balance between external control and internal improvement (Dano & Stensaker,2009), therefore placing discussions of academic and academic support matters in a quality framework only makes sense.
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Circles exploit teamwork by emphasizing on the techne of each individual member of an organization. In particular, Q-Cs rely on self-actualization on the part of each participant to want to do their best for the group. The literature on... more
Circles exploit teamwork by emphasizing on the techne of each individual member of an organization. In particular, Q-Cs rely on self-actualization on the part of each participant to want to do their best for the group. The literature on Quality Circle in education is scarce, ...
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Accountability in higher education is creating different expectations of quality and success. Traditionally, colleges and universities have defined quality based on accreditation, thereby creating a complicated regulatory environment.... more
Accountability in higher education is creating different expectations of quality and success. Traditionally, colleges and universities have defined quality based on accreditation, thereby creating a complicated regulatory environment. Many educators bel..
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The 2006 Spellings Commission Report was seen as an attempt by critics of higher education to reshape it in a manner that diminishes institutional autonomy, changes the role of faculty, institutional mission and focus in the name of... more
The 2006 Spellings Commission Report was seen as an attempt by critics of higher education to reshape it in a manner that diminishes institutional autonomy, changes the role of faculty, institutional mission and focus in the name of accountability. Previous national reports had called for a similar shift based on a reconceptualization of what higher education institutions should be doing based on a global knowledge industry Humboldtian capacity-building model in order to maintain a national competitive economic advantage and the quality of life issues this advantage brings. However, the Spellings Commission Report was not an isolated incident; it reflected a larger international trend in higher education. The global economy has expanded the demand for higher education to meet the intellectual capital and workforce development needs from outsourced activities and has led to the internationalization of numerous college and university programs to meet this demand. Europe’s Bologna Proc...
Professional education is both an epistemological and ontological experience. The end game is to be a practitioner within a selected profession that satisfies personal expectations while contributing to society through practice. There is... more
Professional education is both an epistemological and ontological experience. The end game is to be a practitioner within a selected profession that satisfies personal expectations while contributing to society through practice. There is a triadic sensemaking relationship between the individual wanting to be a professional, the higher education institution (HEI) providing the preparatory curriculum and related experiences and the different stakeholders who employ the new professional and those expecting intellectual capital and productivity gains from these new professionals. Therefore, quality is a many-sided perception dependent on whose purpose frames its evaluation and the extent to which outcomes are determined to be gains. This chapter discusses the various perspectives of what quality is and the transferability of determinations between the different perceivers.
Since 2014 the Australasian Council for Open Distance and eLearning (ACODE) have been holding biennial inter-institutional benchmarking summits for those higher education institutions wishing to benchmark their capacity in technology... more
Since 2014 the Australasian Council for Open Distance and eLearning (ACODE) have been holding biennial inter-institutional benchmarking summits for those higher education institutions wishing to benchmark their capacity in technology enhanced learning. Over this time the evidence has been mounting as to the longer-term benefits for many of the institutions undertaking this activity. For those who have regularly applied this tool, it can be demonstrated that there have been improvements in particular areas of their practice. In the light of this, and now that the Commonwealth of Learning have developed their own Benchmarks for technology-enabled learning, it is worth understanding how this tool can be applied by institutions, so that similar or, if one might be bold enough to suggest, better results may be afforded. This paper will compare the two tools and the methodologies adopted and provide suggestions based on the lessons learned from over 40 institutions in Australasia. It will...
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In the context of widening participation and an increasingly competitive higher education (HE) sector with reduced public funding, it has become common to approach potential students as ‘customers’ as a way to improve performance quality.... more
In the context of widening participation and an increasingly competitive higher education (HE) sector with reduced public funding, it has become common to approach potential students as ‘customers’ as a way to improve performance quality. Transaction as a form of two-way (beneficial) engagement has given way to transaction as an exchange for a service...
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Many university co-curricular programs or services are under pressure to demonstrate performance excellence and justify their continued existence. Many of these programs or services also resort to collating easily accessible data such as... more
Many university co-curricular programs or services are under pressure to demonstrate performance excellence and justify their continued existence. Many of these programs or services also resort to collating easily accessible data such as input, transactional and overall satisfaction data; produce some descriptive statistics; and subsequently write business reports that show the programs’ effectiveness or efficiency. However, this common practice is arguably the wrong place to start. A better starting point would be locating these programs within an ecological educational environment, and one that is aligned with the sector’s regulatory compliance requirements and expectations. A metaphor for this would be Russian dolls. Presented here is an initiative where an ecological data framework was designed by a student learning and development unit, which was then deployed with a vision of collecting significant data that can ascertain their programs’ impacts on student outcomes of progress...
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Race to the Top (RTTT) creates concerns for researchers and teachers (Owens, 2009) because of its emphasis on high-stakes testing and the continued lack of collaboration among educators, researchers, and policy makers. These laws reflect... more
Race to the Top (RTTT) creates concerns for researchers and teachers (Owens, 2009) because of its emphasis on high-stakes testing and the continued lack of collaboration among educators, researchers, and policy makers. These laws reflect Foucault's notion of governmentality due to the approach taken to meet the aims of both the Bush and Obama administrations. This four-step study looked into the impact No Child Left Behind (NCLB) had on preservice teacher preparation based on the integrated math-science (IMS)model. A review of the literature identified 16 studies on IMS that provided the basis for a national survey to determine the reasons for offering IMS, the successes and challenges of the model, and the future of IMS at their higher education institutions (HEI). The number of IMS courses was lower than found in catalogs and the overall rate of IMS courses during 2004-05 was comparable to that in the 1950s.
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While Scholtes (1999) has proposed interdependence and interaction as a fifth element to Deming’s (1994) system of profound knowledge (SPK) because of the importance of these notions by themselves, this author has been arguing that public... more
While Scholtes (1999) has proposed interdependence and interaction as a fifth element to Deming’s (1994) system of profound knowledge (SPK) because of the importance of these notions by themselves, this author has been arguing that public policy should be added as another element (a sixth one) in because policy either directly or indirectly shapes
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This paper discusses how the increased use of student engagement data in combination with student satisfaction data use as a proxy for unit and instruction quality suggests a rethinking of student support services. While there is a... more
This paper discusses how the increased use of student engagement data in combination with student satisfaction data use as a proxy for unit and instruction quality suggests a rethinking of student support services. While there is a question as to the definition what student engagement encompasses, it nevertheless places focus on student services as it attempts to make students want to become more engaged on campus activities as a means of improving learning. However, most quality assurance frameworks only look at student engagement and student satisfaction from a cognitive outcomes/output perspective. Such identification and use of data emanating from this limited student satisfaction and engagement perspective suggests that those aspects of the university that indirectly and somewhat directly impact student learning and happiness with the university are overlooked. The implication is that QA frameworks should be having performance criteria/standards specific to student support to m...