Supporting academics' initial development as university teachers is important for improving their ability to contribute to high-quality education and for reducing anxiety and stress around teaching. Focusing on tasks experienced as challenging is considered a key principle for organising effective teacher professional development. To apply this…

This paper discusses the precariousness of an academic profession in contemporary Slovakia and Poland. Although some of the patterns have been previously studied, this analysis sheds new light on the problems of Polish and Slovak academia as seen by foreigners, who, according to official policy, are expected to contribute to the excellence of…

In a university, research is used to generate new knowledge and also increases the visibility of the university. The quality of research undertaken by the university is important in defining the nature of the university and its ranking nationally, regionally, and internationally. In universities, for research to be vibrant and quality-oriented, it…

Research Productivity (RP) is the key element in the establishment of ranking and rating system in the Higher Education (HE) sector. Despite of the many initiatives taken to enliven the research culture among academic staff, there are still constraints and resistance towards conducting research. Therefore, this study attempts to identify the…

The internationalisation of higher education is a dynamic and specific process that is continuously shaped by the context in which it occurs. This article reports on a study that explored perceptions on the internationalisation concept and how it manifests in public universities in Kenya. The article harnesses a phenomenographic analysis approach…

In many countries in recent decades, great importance has been placed on the concept of quality assurance in education. In Slovenian schools, quality assessment and assurance processes are based on a combination of self-evaluation and external evaluation, although significantly more weight has been attached to self-evaluation than external…

Mary O'Sullivan writes that she spent part of her sabbatical leave interviewing teacher educators from nine countries across three continents exploring teacher education contexts both nationally and locally, and the nature of the 'teacher educators' work in these contexts. Three issues struck her: (1) The intensification of regulation and policy…

With expectations of academic staff to achieve high quality teaching and research outputs as performance measures it is timely to explore how staff perceive they are being supported to meet these ends. This article presents findings of a multi-method study that explored influences impacting on the quality and quantity of scholarly activity being…

This paper presents the leadership implications from a study that explored how to increase the quality of teaching in a university thereby presenting data from the bottom up--the academic perspective--to inform leadership, policies, and academic development which generally flows from the top down. We report academics' perceptions of and…

The purpose of this case study was to explore faculty members' perceptions of the QEP in a public doctoral university with highest research activity. Particularly, the study explored how faculty members perceive the role of the QEP in student learning and institutional effectiveness, the relevance of the QEP activities in student learning and…

This study explored how faculty members at regular higher education institutions in China perceived the National Undergraduate Teaching and Learning Evaluation (NUTLE). Specifically, this study examined how the NUTLE influenced faculty teaching and research and how the NUTLE influenced student learning outcomes. Primarily descriptive and…

This article reviews the Mid-Career Development Chinese Language course (MCDCL) funded by the British Inter-university China Centre, a project funded from various public sources in the UK. The discussion focuses on how and why the MCDCL course has adopted the blended learning construct and with what outcomes. Using two frameworks for blended…

This case study investigated the impact of academic capitalism on academic culture by examining the perspectives of faculty members in an American academic department with significant industrial funding. The results of this study indicate that faculty members believe that the broad integrity of the academic culture remains unaffected in this…

Noting continued need for high quality graduate schools to teach students to specialize and to expand their perspectives, the author comments on a new academic provincialism, characterized by hostility to research and the courting of student popularity, that threatens the future of quality graduate education. (JT)

An investigation of the relationship between informal interaction with students and the accuracy with which faculty members project students' perceptions of the institutional climate showed that "high" interactors consistently projected more accurate student ratings of the climate on a bureaucracy factor and less consistently predicted more…