Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

"Higher education is uniquely placed to play a leading role in the attainment of sustainable development. This catalyst potential needs grounding, however, in a context where universities and colleges are currently seen as contributing to the sustainability crisis. Sustainability challenges the current paradigms, structures as well as predominant practices in higher
education: this is a consistent message found throughout the literature. Universities and colleges are
facing this reality as they seek to meaningfully contribute to sustainability. The paper argues that this requires going beyond the integration of key ideas in existing curriculum; the commissioning of a new sustainable building or supporting the sustainability action projects which often occur in the fringes of the institution. Instead, the sustainability journey engages universities and colleges in a quest for interdisciplinarity, participatory pedagogies, ‘real world ‘ research and the opening of institutional boundaries so that the notion of sustainable communities is extended beyond university and college walls. The paper proposes that a systemic or connected view of sustainability across institutions is required to transform the educational experience of students and lead social change for
sustainability. Through mapping the international declarations and frameworks for higher education, this paper confirms the, in principle, commitment of universities and colleges to transform the higher education experience towards sustainability. The paper then contrasts these public intentions with a review of
global and regional progress in the areas of leadership and strategy; modeling practice; education and learning; partnerships and outreach for sustainability in higher education. It suggests that
achievements have been random and mostly disconnected from the core business of higher education. The paper concludes that if the higher education sector is to be transformative, it needs
to transform itself. This will be a lengthy and ambitious process which will require strong leadership."

If the University 1.0 is the old university of the guilds, which survives in the Oxbridge model, the University 1.5 is the national university modelled on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Kantian “University of Culture.” Our local universities were instituted in its spirit, with the aim to create cultural capital for the nation (Readings 1996: 11).

The University 2.0 (hereafter “U 2.0”) is the “University of Excellence” that aims to produce intellectual capital for the market. No longer the bricks-and-mortar ecclesiastical edifice of old, it is glass and modular, (supposedly) transparent and transportable in its protocols, processes and practices: a transcendental university. Witness the Owen G. Glenn Building of the University of Auckland Business School, the flagship building of the University’s enterprise that was launched — or landed — in 2007.

The U 2.0 is thoroughly and transparently market-oriented and -driven — econocratic: in other words, it is governed economantically and econometrically, that is, by means of prophetic (mantic) mission statements, policy documents, even course outlines that are formulated in the language of performance metrics — aims, objectives, outcomes, etc. Its built environment works likewise to produce a certain academic atmosphere — and “atmospheric politics” (Sloterdijk 2004). That is to say, its academosphere is vacuum-packed for the market.

We will argue that this “distributive” impetus or design-drive dislocates the present from the past, people from place, work from life, and learning from teaching in the university. The Business School, as the temple and template of the U 2.0, discloses this design-drive, its very openness seeming to close off other kinds of talking and thinking, and its architectural vectors to generate a vortex into which all academia is drawn.

As a participant in 'What Works' (2013-17), an HEA led programme that aims to enhance student success and retention in higher education, the University of Brighton is conducting an ongoing evaluation to investigate students' experiences of starting their degrees, including retention interventions in three disciplines: Business Management , Applied Social Science (Hastings) and Digital Media courses. This article presents findings of the 2013-14 University of Brighton qualitative study, which accompanied the UK wide What Works survey led by Mantz Yorke. Findings suggest that learning, teaching, assessment and interventions helped to enhance students' engagement, confidence and sense of belonging to peer learning communities in each discipline. However, data also identified transitional challenges that students faced and highlighted suggestions for positive change. This has helped inform further discipline related developments in teaching, curricula and interventions in 2014-15, contributing to the university's commitment to providing an engaging and successful experience for first year students.

This article argues that alternate models of doctoral research teaching and learning pedagogy could address the challenge of under-productivity of doctoral graduands in the South African higher education system. Present literature tends not to focus on the models of research teaching and learning as a form of pedagogy. The article presents a case study of a doctoral cohort model programme where attention to both quantity and quality of doctoral “production” are engaged in the curriculum design and methodological approaches employed. In this alternate to the traditional “master-apprenticeship”, epistemologies that the programme creates are influenced by its pedagogical methodologies. This reflective theoretical exploration draws on the experiences of supervisors, staff and students as co-producers of knowledge involved in the research pedagogical process. The doctoral graduands that emerge are able to embrace the roles and responsibilities as researchers and knowledge makers. Rather ...

Recent university internationalization efforts have resulted in unprecedented numbers of international students in Japan’s higher education institutions. Some of these students are in newly developed full degree English-taught programs designed primarily for international students. Others study alongside Japanese students in English- or Japanese-medium programs.

This poster presents the experiences of both international and domestic students.

Students4Change is a project co-funded by the European Union and the European Commission under<br> the Erasmus+ Programme for Capacity Building in the Field of Higher Education. This project has 15<br> partner universities, 10 Latin American and five European, and a Non-Governmental Organization - ASHOKA,engaging at an international level. This three-year consortium takes place between October 2016 and October 2019. Therefore, the scope of the project presents two particular characteristics: first, is an intercontinental collaboration between Latin American and European universities; second, is the first Erasmus+ project coordinated by a non-European country. Coordination of the project is carried out by Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (México). The primary objective of this project is to develop a pedagogical method to aid in disseminating and developing competences for feasible and desirable social innovation and social entrepreneurship in L...

In this chapter we argue for the centrality of the unique languages, cultures and traditions of the academic disciplines to university teaching and learning and for the need to redefine the relationship between disciplinary and educational experts when enhancing education in research-intensive universities.  We propose a conceptual framework that privileges the discipline as a key factor in designing educational enhancement strategies, while acknowledging institutional and national contexts.  This framework guides an examination of three specific case studies from three different research-intensive universities (University of Copenhagen (UCPH), University o Leuven (KU Leuven), University of Oxford), each with its own history of educational development and enhancement strategies for the past several decades. We outline the method for writing and interrogating those cases. The cases highlight challenges associated with efforts to enhance teaching and learning in research-intensive universities and the role the disciplines can play in those efforts.  We conclude with recommendations for educational enhancement practice drawn from this analysis of multi-institutional cases.

En estos momentos la universidad española se encuentra inmersa en un proceso de cambio que viene marcado, por un lado, por la renovación que impone la legislación, y por otro, por unos Planes de Conver-gencia con Europa que parecen imponer criterios de racionalidad y eficacia a su misión. La realidad de este cambio pasará indefectiblemente por el crisol de la calidad, lo que determina que éste sea un criterio de pleno derecho a integrar en la vida académica del futuro. Sin duda, un elemento indispensable para garantizar este proceso es la calidad docente. Pero la labor docente ha sido estudiada fundamentalmente desde la propia perspectiva del profesorado, necesitándose imprimir también el enfoque propio del destinatario. Ese es precisamente el objetivo de nuestro estudio, en el que afrontamos un diseño centrado en la opinión que el alumnado ofrece sobre las características que demanda de sus profesores
Abstract:
Nowadays, Spanish University is involved in a change process due to two main reasons: firstly, the new legislation and secondly, the future plans for the European educational convergence. From both perspectives, the quality is imposed as criteria of University efficiency. Therefore, many studies have been performed to prove that quality is a valuable criterion in the educational process; however, the teacher's role has not been analysed properly by the pupils. Therefore, the target of this project is to consider the students' opinion about the ideal characteristics that their teachers should have.

""Abstract : Information Technology in language teaching probably began with papyrus. It has attracted admirers and detractors ever since. This paper takes a slightly irreverent look at current IT, as well as its actual and potential uses in foreign and second language education. The power of commerce in IT development has always been a prime motivator, so the analysis here recognizes the essential economic context, with the resulting effects on language learning. Technology itself is shifting at warp speed from 2005, the time of writing, but the essential choices dealt with in the paper are still of central interest.

An earlier, less referenced version of this paper was published in the Asian EFL Journal, vol.1, 2005 at http://asian-efl-journal.com/pta_jan_04_tm.html. A slightly shorter but more up to date version has also been published as "Brief Thoughts About IT in Language Education" in Teaching English With Technology, vol.5/2 May 2005 (IATEFL Poland)at http://www.iatefl.org.pl/call/j_article21.htm""

The report presents main results of the Students 4 Change, project, which was co-funded by the European Union and the European Commission under the Erasmus+ Programme for Capacity Building in the Field of Higher Education. The project involved 15 partner universities, 10 Latin American and five European, and a Non-Governmental Organization - ASHOKA, engaging at an international level. This three-year consortium took place between October 2016 and October 2019. The scope of the project presented two particular characteristics: first, it was an intercontinental collaboration between Latin American and European universities; second, it was the first Erasmus+ project coordinated by a non-European country. Coordination of the project was carried out by Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (México).

As a participant in ‘What Works' (2013-17), an HEA-led programme that aims to enhance student success and retention in higher education, the University of Brighton is conducting an ongoing evaluation to investigate students' experiences of starting their degrees, including retention interventions in three disciplines: Business Management, Applied Social Science (Hastings) and Digital Media courses. This article presents findings of the 2013-14 University of Brighton qualitative study, which accompanied the UK wide What Works survey led by Mantz Yorke. Findings suggest that learning, teaching, assessment and interventions helped to enhance students' engagement, confidence and sense of belonging to peer learning communities in each discipline. However, data also identified transitional challenges that students faced and highlighted suggestions for positive change. This has helped inform further discipline related developments in teaching, curricula and interventions in 201...

In the era of digital transformation, the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) has become as a must to achieve more people with affordable prices.Hence, in the delivery of psychological testing,the psychologists, counselors, and other experts become more and more integrated into the use of the ICT.Such integration would not only help to achieve more people, particularly those who are under privilege, but would also improve the quality, flexibility, and the rapidness of the services. In the global era, the importance of psychological testing has been markedly increasing in education as well in business world. However, the accessing more people and preparing the reports for those people are expensive and need more time. Therefore, most of the counseling and psychology based centers and institutions have preferred to use intensively the psychological testing by using ICT.

This paper has focused on the usage of ICT on psychological testing in one of the selected public university in Turkey. The aim is to find out why psychologists and counselors,and even students use ICT on psychological testing and their perceptions and expectations about this new service. A simple random sampling was chosen to select 38 undergraduate students who had taken the psychological testing online. Two psychologists and three counsellors, who had been using ICT on psychological testing more than 8 months, were engaged to the research. In the research study, the phenomenological analysis had been preferred by giving nine research questions. The participants had answered why they used this service, and what were their perceptions and expectations in the semi-structured interviews.

By using Atlas.ti 7, the collected data were studied critically.The findings of this study revealed that the psychologists and counselors use ICT on psychological testing for reaching more students. More importantly, according to the participants as experts, the number of attendance has increased significantly because of the flexibility of time and space. Additionally, the quality of testing has improved dramatically due to the ICT’s effectiveness and efficiencies in collecting and storing data. Furthermore, as the psychologists and counselors point out, they have spent less time in reporting and they find better opportunities to collect more data and to make comparative studies.According to them, even though their perceptions and expectations about using ICT on psychological testing are negative at the beginning, they change after seeing the positive sides for themselves as well for the students.

Furthermore, most of the students (98%) clarify that they enjoy being parts of this service since it is easy, friendly use, flexible, attractive, and innovative. Since they can access even through the social media, the large number of the students (86%) have clarified that integration of ICT through the use of chat rooms, email and social networking, they become more interested and being aware about certain aspects.Even though a large number of them (91%) say that they like to have face-to-face relationship with the psychologists and counselors, they all agree that ICT increase visibility, affordability, and accessibility of the service. In conclusion, the study recommends that ICT would play important roles to achieve more and more students with a few experts since they increase capacity building by improving visibility, affordability, and accessibility of the service.
keywords: ict, psychological testing, higher education, visibility, affordability, accessibility.