Quality Assurance (QA) aims to ensure and enhance educational quality, promote accountability, and foster sustainable improvement and is considered a crucial element for higher education systems in a world of constant change, increased competitiveness, technological innovation, and rising costs. In the last several years, quality assurance in…

The adoption of online teaching and learning in educational settings poses a notable challenge to teachers as they are required to implement student-centered pedagogy in online learning environments. This is often hindered by teachers' insufficient preparation in this area. The current study hinges on two underexplored aspects that may explain…

Connecting teachers' professional well-being and managerialism, this study explored how teachers experience their professional well-being in navigating challenging working conditions. Supported by the well-being theory, document analyses were carried out and open-ended questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were conducted with teachers at…

Over the past two decades, external influences over continuous curriculum improvement have increased, so universities have implemented centralized approaches to respond to external accountability demands, such as national and international accreditations. These approaches have diminished teaching staff engagement with continuous curriculum…

Background: The landscape of higher education continues to evolve in ways that have significant implications for the academic profession, including the shaping of academic identities. In a context of increasing marketisation, it is essential to understand more about the complex relationship between academic identities and structural change within…

To improve the teaching quality of higher education, the Chinese government has been striving to strengthen teaching accountability in universities. This qualitative study investigates the effects of the current teaching accountability mechanisms on academics at two universities. This study finds a gap between the goal of accountability and the…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how instructional designers in higher education in the United States described their experiences with collective affective emergent states (team cohesion and collective efficacy) when collaborating with faculty to design online courses. The foundation for the study was the…

The aim of this essay is to show the importance of faculty collaboration in combating structural educational inequities and how it can help to radically reimagine pedagogy and higher education in the pandemic and beyond. Abolitionist teaching and pedagogy can begin with peer exchange--a teaching commons--that can support faculty before they even…

In the sphere of higher education (HE) globally the tensions between academic autonomy and accountability, and the research vs teaching debate have been ongoing for decades. Zumeta (2011, p. 133) notes one of the reasons for such tensions to be the view of accountability as a social construct, resulting in its definition varying from context to…

The aim of this paper is to explore how practical knowledge can enhance higher education and Bildung for the human service professions. The paper sheds light on how governance reforms such as New Public Management have influenced higher education, where we argue that scientific rationality has weakened the professional's autonomy and…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate how sustainability has been incorporated -- or mainstreamed -- in a school at one university through techniques of responsibilization and accountabilization. Design/methodology/approach: Inspired by the extended case study methodology, the authors participated, observed and analyzed two audit-inspired…

The impact of neoliberalism in higher education has been widely discussed and debated, yet most analyses have viewed the changes on university governance and academic work in different countries as slavishly bound by more global neoliberal factors without paying sufficient attention to the local contextual factors. This empirical study foregrounds…

The need to improve institutional performance seems clear considering equity gaps and the high costs associated with higher education. Although the idea of holding higher education institutions accountable for their students' success is laudable, it is also pushing many institutions to make decisions based on meeting externally imposed metrics.…

Increasingly, competing discourses shape tensions between the role of the contemporary university and the global markets in which universities must exist. This paper draws on the examination of interviews with nine education academics in Australia to illuminate the construction of 'global' in the production of the global graduate (GG). Discourse…

This article discusses the intensification of research performance demands in UK universities in relation to the complex terrain of academic identity formation. It considers whether a demand for academic researchers to produce and evidence economic and societal impact -- in the rewards game of the UK's performance-based research funding system,…