To cope with the rapidly changing higher education climate, teachers need agency to act proactively in initiating and steering changes in practice. This paper describes an academic development activity in the form of a Change Laboratory, an intervention method based on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, to facilitate agency among teachers. The…

The emergence of 'new managerialism' in academic institutions and professions has given rise to tensions between one's professional self and work context. Such tensions often originate from a misalignment between institutional and personal values. This study builds on a dialogical approach to identity and discusses the role of inner tensions and…

Professors use various strategies to improve learning. To explore what professors perceived as critical aspects of engaging instruction, we conducted a qualitative case study with seven professors in the United States. Data was collected through individual face-to-face interviews. The conversations were audio-taped and transcribed verbatim. The…

Implications for student dropouts include fewer career options and lower earning potential. The purpose of this study was to investigate faculty perceptions of their roles in the student retention process at a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in the Southeast United States. Guiding the phenomenological study was Lewin's theory of…

In the changing context of universities, organisational structures for teaching and research problematise academic roles. This paper draws on a critical realist analysis of surveys and interviews with academics from universities in England and Australia. It identifies important academic work, not captured simply in descriptions of teaching or…

This study explains the dual task on both political and academic issues in Chinese higher education, using Fudan University in Hong Kong SAR, People's Republic of China (PRC), as a case study. The research problem focuses on the dynamics and complexity of the interplay among the state, university, staff, and students in the process of…

Learning management systems (LMS) have become the norm in recent years in higher education to further engage students and lecturers. The e-learning tools within LMS provide knowledge sharing and community building opportunities that can support both critical thinking and higher order learning skills through conversation and collaboration. However,…

Institutions of higher education both value and need student assessment data. Faculty, as seen in numerous studies, however, have generally negatively received the formalization and reporting of student assessments to gather this assessment data. If we could better understand faculty experiences and perceptions of student assessment data within…

Instructors play a role in helping online students develop a sense of community in virtual classrooms, but little is known about instructors' roles in online graduate programs. To explore the ways in which online instructors helped students create a learning community, defined as a space of connection, closeness and interactivity, the researcher…

There is an expectation that medical students in the UK will be able to demonstrate conversancy with social science relevant to medicine and health, including the means by which the relevant bodies of knowledge are generated through the use of social science research methods. This paper explores the structural and pedagogical challenges and…

Quality assurance is a major agenda in tertiary education. The casualisation of academic work, especially in teaching, is also a quality assurance issue. Casual or sessional staff members teach and assess more than 50% of all university courses in Australia, and yet the research in relation to the role sessional staff play in quality assurance of…

Students in higher education typically learn to use information as part of their course of study, which is intended to support ongoing academic, personal and professional growth. Informing the development of effective information literacy education, this research uses a phenomenographic approach to investigate the experiences of a teacher and…

Tutoring involves providing learners with a suitable level of structure and guidance to support their learning. This study reports on an exploration of how to design such structure and guidance (i.e., learning scaffolds) in the Chinese online educational context, and in so doing, answer the following two questions: (a) What scaffolding strategies…

The increase of enrollment in dual credit courses in high schools is staggering and traditional methods of delivering dual credit stop short of meeting the demand. In one newer model, college professors teach dual credit courses on high school campuses. However, little is known about how the uniqueness of the high school setting informs the…

This study investigates sustainability science as an emerging scientific field and the role of faculty members at higher education institutions as drivers of change in sustainability-science-based research, teaching, and community engagement. Seven factors related to the transdisciplinary field of sustainability science are analyzed for their…