Due to growing pressures on universities, many master's degree students are offered all or part of their thesis supervision in groups involving core feedback skills and engagement. Given that not all graduate students understand or are comfortable with the academic discourse and strategies for formative feedback engagement, the institutions cannot…

The concept of student partnership has attracted increased attention during the last decade, often due to an assumption that it can mitigate neo-liberal agendas and practices in teaching and learning. A review of definitions and understandings of student partnership models shows that most of the research conducted on this topic has been based on…

Blended learning is often viewed as a teaching mode that integrates a combination of online interactive activities with face-to-face learnings. This includes a mixture of different types of teaching and learning techniques, and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) tools. In this study, we undertook an experiment to ascertain what…

The literature on interdisciplinary higher education is influenced by two overall trends: one looks at the institutional level of specially designed interdisciplinary institutions, while the other assesses individual interdisciplinary educational activities. Much less attention is given to the processes of creating interdisciplinary education…

Student cohorts in higher education are rapidly diversifying. Approaches to student engagement in teaching and learning must evolve to meet the changing needs of these diverse groups of students equitably. Student-staff partnership is an approach to student engagement embracing the diverse experiences of both students and staff. Growing evidence…

The new paradigms of university social responsibility (USR) conceive students as key players who express their beliefs, attitudes and opinions both in the professional training process and in their willingness to serve the community in line with the agenda of USR. This research focuses on a comparative study of the social representations that…

A growing expectation that academic staff in higher education institutions (HEIs) will be qualified to doctoral level can mean that doctoral study must be juggled alongside administration, teaching, and academic duties. Many academics study in their own institutions. We wished to explore their perspectives on (i) how the two roles, of being an…

Intensifying marketisation across higher education (HE) in England continues to generate critical commentary on the potentially devastating consequences of market logic for pedagogy. In this paper, we consider the student-consumer prominent in these debates as a contested yet under-analysed entity. In contrast to the dominance of "homo…

In the global university sector competitive funding models are progressively becoming the norm, and institutions/courses are frequently now subject to the same kind of consumerist pressures typical of a highly marketised environment. In the United Kingdom, for example, students are increasingly demonstrating customer-like behaviour and are now…

This paper documents a study investigating co-construction of knowledge by doctoral students in an online learning community. In this study 12 students participated in the coursework and thesis proposal development stages of a doctoral program offered by a research-intensive university in New Zealand. Socio-cultural and social constructivist…

Policy changes prompt many universities to become more entrepreneurial and doctoral researchers, especially those working in science and technology, are expected to play important roles, contributing to the growth of knowledge economies through entrepreneurial activity. Informal evidence of differing views on entrepreneurship between Chinese and…

This article outlines the main cases for and related objections against student representation in university governance found in the relevant literature, and proposes a way in which variations in student representation within institutions may be understood and justified. It contextualises the modern origins of student representation in the…

The role and contribution of students to the governance of university departments is a relatively neglected area of inquiry. This study investigated the factors which student representatives perceived to help or hinder their effectiveness as student members of departmental committees. Twenty students from a range of disciplines were interviewed…

The dominant metaphor/model used to characterise the relationship of the student to the university, that is, the "student as consumer", is partial and not appropriate to the realities of contemporary higher education. This article suggests that co-production, a concept drawn from the public administration literature, offers a more…

This article deals with how a major top-down reform in Norwegian higher education has affected student writing, and teachers' and students' roles. The Quality Reform was strongly influenced by the Bologna Declaration and was implemented from 2002. One of the outcomes was that, while Norwegian universities previously demanded very little…