Current forms of marketisation in university systems create pressures towards purely ends-focused expectations among students and have implications for learning and assessment processes. The potential harm that these trends have on "learning" should be resisted by educators and students alike. Critical Pedagogy approaches offer one way…

In the second decade of the new century, America's public higher education institutions (PHEIs) face several key challenges: rising demands of accountability, a steady drop in public funding, and competition from virtual and for-profit entities. Limited research had been conducted on the applicability of social enterprise theory to these…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how a cohort of university faculty leaders in Canadian universities conceptualize sustainable development, sustainable universities, the role universities play in achieving a sustainable future, key issues facing the university, and the barriers to implementing sustainability initiatives on campus.…

This project explores stakeholders' perceptions of the role of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) in the admissions processes of UK higher education (HE) institutions. The term "stakeholders" here refers to HE academic and administrative staff responsible for the acceptance of students whose first language is not…

In this article, teachers' sense-making and reasoning about higher education reforms in a post Soviet country, namely Armenia, are examined using an analytical framework with six sensitising concepts: beliefs, emotions, attitudes, change knowledge, attributions and organisational culture. The results of semi-structured interviews with 12 Armenian…

How novice lecturers learn to be successful in their role is relatively under-researched, although the assumption may be made that the newcomer has learned the fundamentals how to engage in academic practice--at least in terms of research and scholarship--via the PhD process. However, although many lecturers now enter from a professional or…

Because of the potentialities and influences of information communication technologies (ICTs) in facilitating research and instruction in higher education, students' learning products and processes can no longer be restricted to ink on paper. The problem, however, is that ICT use for instructional purposes by staff members at institutions of…

This paper reviews the findings of a participatory research project conducted with Nepali high school and university students. It examines the feelings and motivations of those students who leave the country in pursuit of higher education, and those who intentionally, or due to circumstances, stay in Nepal. An analysis of the latter is…

College and university presidents are the public face of not only their institution but also of higher education in general. Internal and external audiences alike turn to the president for leadership, inspiration, and action. While the gender demographics of student and faculty groups in higher education have become more equal, gender parity at…

This paper reports the effects of the properties of source texts on summarization. One hundred and fifty-seven undergraduates were asked to write summaries of one of three extended English texts of similar length and readability, but differing in other discoursal features such as lexical diversity and macro-organization. The effects of…

The perceptions of college faculty regarding outcomes assessment were explored using a qualitative interview research approach. Three faculty members at a liberal arts college in the United States were interviewed about their understandings, reactions to, and concerns regarding the assessment movement. Faculty members differed in their…

This study examines the factors influencing language and script choice in instant messaging (IM), a form of real-time computer-mediated communication, in a multilingual setting. Grounded in the New Literacy Studies, the study understands IM as a social practice involving texts, encompassing a range of literacy practices, within which a subset…

A qualitative, hermeneutic phenomenological study conducted through interviews with 20 non-traditional (NT) Hispanic/Latino female part-time community college students and located at an urban community college in southern New Jersey explored for factors of persistence and discontinuation. Six themes emerged. Theme 1: Institutional persistence…

Having grown up in an age of rapidly developing electronic communication technology, today's students come to higher education with high levels of comfort and familiarity with computer-mediated communication (CMC, hereafter). The students' level of comfort with CMC, coupled with CMC's promises of enabling supplemental class discussion as well as…

A study of graduate students examined how learners process videotaped materials on familiar and unfamiliar topics. Analysis of interviews suggested that all participants interpreted the content of the videotape relative to topics with which they were familiar. In their responses, those familiar with topics offered more inferences, while those…