In October 2005, the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine released a policy report that served as a call to action. The report, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future" observed that "the scientific and technological building blocks…

Sallie Mae has conducted "How America Pays for College" annually since 2008, providing information about the resources American families invest in an undergraduate college education. This study focuses particularly on the planning and payment behaviors in a given academic year. Now in its fifth year, the study allows tracking over time of changes…

American universities, we are often told, are the best in the world. Rankings of schools worldwide done by organizations in both China and Great Britain consistently are dominated by U.S. institutions. More than half of the top 100 schools (and eight of the top 10) in the Shanghai rankings, for example, are American schools. A huge portion of…

Graduate capabilities are an essential aspect of undergraduate development in higher education. Accordingly, La Trobe University's "Design for learning" has identified particular university-wide graduate capabilities and required all faculties to explicitly embed these in their curricula. The Faculty of Law and Management developed an approach to…

Distance writing programs still struggle with assessment strategies that can evaluate student writing as well as their ability to communicate about that writing with peers at a distance. This article uses Kim, Smith and Maeng's 2008 distance education program assessment scheme to evaluate a single distance writing program at Old Dominion…

We transformed our first-year curriculum in biology with a new course, Biological Inquiry, in which greater than 50% of all incoming, first-year students enroll. The course replaced a traditional, content-driven course that relied on outdated approaches to teaching and learning. We diversified pedagogical practices by adopting guided inquiry in…

This article discusses the effectiveness of the case method when teaching online by comparing synchronous and asynchronous communication technologies with respect to how well they each embody Chickering and Gamson's Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. The authors also present their empirical study of the effectiveness of…

When teaching Information Systems (IS), one of the crucial objectives is to make students understand the practical aspects of the integration of IS in organizations. Over the last decades, several pedagogical approaches were introduced to more tightly bridge theory and practice, e.g., hands on exercises, simulations, real world projects, guest…

This article discusses how the idea of higher education students as producers of knowledge rather than consumers can be operationalised by means of student research projects, in which processes of research archiving and analysis are enabled through the use of semantic technologies. It discusses how existing digital repository frameworks can be…

Purpose: The need for "job-ready" graduates has catalysed the development of non-technical skills in higher education institutions worldwide. Continued criticism of business school outcomes has provoked this examination of non-technical skill deficiencies in Australian business graduates. The purpose of this paper is to compare findings…

Tobacco has been an agricultural staple from the time of the first recorded European encounter with the plant in the fifteenth century. The pervasive nature of its cultivation and consumption has made tobacco one of the most profitable crops in world agricultural history. This case study examines the role of tobacco in the global marketplace with…

The purpose of this study was to examine subject attentional resource allocation during performance of the multitask operation of conducting, where multiple cognitive and kinesthetic tasks are performed concurrently. Subjects' (n = 15) attentional resources were measured through primary task performance, consisting of both gesture and aural…

The growing diversity in American society is reflected in a multicultural student population with which managers and educators in higher education interact. Student diversity presents a challenge within higher education, especially in the development of programs that support an environment that is conducive to learning for its students. This…

The Biology Intensive Orientation for Students (BIOS) Program was designed to assess the impact of a five-day intensive pre-freshman program on success and retention of biological science majors at a large research university. The program combined content lectures and examinations for the Introductory Biology course for Science Majors, as well as…

We present calculations of ion-atom collisions using a partial-wave expansion of the projectile wavefunction. Most calculations of ion-atom collisions have typically used classical or plane-wave approximations for the projectile wavefunction, since partial-wave expansions are expected to require prohibitively large numbers of terms to converge…