We describe findings from a study based upon a collaborative project carried out online as the end of module assessment activity of a multidisciplinary science module at the UK Open University. Our aim was to determine how well students dealt with working in a team of unfamiliar multidisciplinary scientists and to identify tools and processes that…

The ability to work effectively in a diverse team is a valuable skill which is transferable to many contexts. As such, it is important to build this skill through deliberate, targeted, and meaningful learning activities in higher education. The Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) model enhances team diversity by combining students from different…

Work-integrated learning (WIL) is proliferating in university courses across many countries. Like many educational practices, students' experience of it is shaped by the assessment processes adopted. Does assessment support or inhibit what WIL seeks to foster? To explore how students experience assessment in WIL, a small-scale investigation was…

Assessment and feedback are common sources of student dissatisfaction within higher education, and employers have shown dissatisfaction with graduates' communication skills. Authentic assessment, containing 'real-world' context and student collaboration, provides a means to address both issues simultaneously. We discuss how we used authentic…

Across disciplines, skills associated with collaboration are now ubiquitously considered requisite graduate attributes. Despite decades of studies on the various dimensions of academic teamwork, challenges for both students and staff remain. For this year-long study at a UK school of architecture, we considered teamwork as a thread woven through…

Groupwork is a crucial aspect of work contexts and a key twenty first century skill. Assessment of groupwork provides a persistent challenge for educators in university contexts with students reporting experiences of unfairness from their peers during groupwork. This study developed a novel Peer Assessment Fairness Instrument to explore factors…

There is a widely acknowledged need to improve the reliability and efficiency of scientific research to increase the credibility of the published scientific literature and accelerate discovery. Widespread improvement requires a cultural shift in both thinking and practice, and better education will be instrumental to achieve this. Here we argue…

Supporting children and young people's mental health and well-being is central to UK Government policy, with statistics suggesting post-16 students and those with learning difficulties are vulnerable. This case study explored how practitioners at a special school for students with severe and profound and multiple learning difficulties promote…

A considerable scholarship now describes the increasing neoliberalization of universities and the accompanying impacts on academic research and researchers. However, less attention has been devoted to issues of research project leadership, especially for academics with feminist commitments. This article reports results of a qualitative study of 12…

The study goal was to assess the innovation level of engineering students' team projects and to examine the relationships between project innovation and team heterogeneity in two online environments. Applying a two-stage mixed methods research design, the qualitative and quantitative data were obtained by interviews with experts in engineering…

Today, higher education institutions are being evaluated by the manners in which they react to the social and economic needs of society, that is, how they are expediting social mobility and wider access to higher education, hence this leads to their actions to enhance graduate employability. Therefore, this research was designed to examine the 34…

This paper challenges the dominant discourse that Higher Education (HE) choice is a consumer choice and questions assumptions underpinning government policy and HE marketing. HE choice is largely viewed as a rational, decontextualised process. However, this interpretivist study found it to be much more complex, and to be about relationships and…

In recent years, more and more international comparative higher education studies have been conducted in internationally and geographically spread project teams and comparative higher education has become a fundamentally collaborative effort. Accordingly, researchers in such projects have to cope with the methodological complexity of international…

Peer-led group learning is a variation of collaborative learning and is based on 'small groups of students meeting regularly with a peer -- one who has additional expertise in the subject matter -- to work on problems collaboratively' (Pazos, Micari, and Light 2010). In this study, we explored how a Slack team environment could be used in a…

With the increasing complexity of the engineering role, today's graduates must be capable of confronting both technical and societal problems; underpinned by effective teamwork at their core. Problem-based learning has been implemented in engineering to better prepare students for modern industry. However, limited research has examined the complex…