The purpose of this study was to describe four successful collaborative action research (CAR) projects through the lens of teacher leaders who facilitated the school teams that conducted the CAR. For each CAR project described, the paper will report on the various phases of the CAR, the challenges of implementation as well as how the challenges…

MegaSoTL projects are scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) projects that generate evidence of learning from multiple institutions. While being increasingly practiced, MegaSoTL projects and their potential contribution to improve higher education pedagogy remain understudied in higher education literature. In this article, we introduce…

As collaborative biomedical research has increased in size and scope, so, too, has the need to facilitate the disparate work being done by investigators across institutional, geographic and, often, disciplinary boundaries. Yet we know little about what facilitation is on a day-to-day basis or what types of facilitation work contribute to the…

The field of biomedical research has undergone several changes in recent years. These include increased funding, the rapid development in scientific knowledge which speeds up the obsolescence of equipment, facilities and knowledge and the growing complexity of scientific problems. Research administrators can take steps to address these changes…

Bibliometric benchmarking can be an aid to researchers pondering whether to apply for competitive grants. In this paper, the highly prestigious grants offered by the European Research Council to young scientists of any nationality were scrutinized. The analysis of the 2014-2015 data indicates that over 75% of life science grantees in the starting…

Many Studies have been conducted on the internationalisation of higher education. Yet little is known about institutional plans for internationalisation on an operational level. This paper was written to provide some insight into the current barriers to the implementation of internationalisation plans. The authors present a case study of…

The purpose of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) is to judge the quality of research in the UK and on that basis to apportion to universities, in a transparent manner, differential shares in the UK's £1.6 billion pot of research funding. However, the funding process is anything but transparent! While the REF process was known years in…

Institutional review boards have a dual goal: first, to protect the rights and welfare of human research subjects, and second, to support and facilitate the conduct of valuable research. In striving to achieve these goals, IRBs must often consider conflicting interests. In the discussion below, we characterize research oversight as having three…

The article introduces this special issue of Higher Education Quarterly in which results of a research project on "European Flagship Universities: Balancing Academic Excellence and Socio-economic Relevance" are presented and discussed. The Flagship project aimed at contributing to a better understanding of the relationship between…

The private sector has been moving toward the idea of consolidating administrative functions within organizations since the 1980s. While this sector has traditionally implemented shared services with cost reduction in mind, traditionally through economies of scale, many universities across the country have begun to explore the concept of managing…

Regulations for research involving human subjects have long been a critical issue in higher education. Federal public policy for research involving human subjects impacts institutions of higher education by requiring all federally funded research to be passed by an Institutional Review Board (IRB). Undergraduate research is no exception. Given the…

In May 2016, the office of Finance and Sponsored Projects at The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital conducted a 5-day design sprint session to re-evaluate and redesign a flawed final reporting process within the department. The department sprint was modeled after the design sprint sessions that occur routinely in software…

There is a constant interplay between the "people" ("agency") and the "parts" ("structure" and "culture"), not only in teaching and learning, but also in postgraduate supervision practices globally. However, in South Africa, the tendency to use "structure" (higher education architecture,…

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) established the Building University Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) initiative to increase engagement and retention of undergraduates from diverse backgrounds in biomedical research. Portland State University, in partnership with ten other academic institutions, received a BUILD award and…

The research ethics committee (REC) is a key element of university administration and has gained increasing importance as a review mechanism for those institutions that wish to conduct responsible research, along with safeguarding research ethics standards, scientific merit and human rights of participants. Given the critical role of the…