Higher Education Teaching and Learning

Some states, including Colorado, Minnesota, and Vermont, aren’t waiting for their public universities to award credit for military and career experience. They’re ordering them to start that process.

An overview of how school based learning can harness the potential of the New Renaissance in Learning promised by our increasing understanding of metacognition and the potential of new learning technologies.

The consensus on the recent A$2.3 billion funding cuts to the tertiary sector is they will do more harm than good.Plenty of commentators foresee diminishing quality of teaching and research, possible…...

A study is making the rounds that details a few of the best ways to improve student achievement. It also touches on the least useful methods.

Abstract

This article reviews academics’ changing conceptions of and approaches to teaching and learning and how these changes vary according to their professional development, discipline and context. The discussion is structured along these academics’ conceptions and approaches and makes recommendations to enhance professional development programmes. A suggestion is made to take an institutional perspective for quality teaching that effectively aligns the university’s teaching and learning strategy with teacher training and assessment, recognition and quality assurance.

Humans are the only social learners of this planet’s uncounted millions of species. We’re biologically equipped to pay attention to and learn from each other, and we’ve devised cultural tools such as speech and writing to augment our biologically endowed cognitive capabilities. We’ve created institutions to equip our young people to benefit from and contribute to civilization. Unfortunately, as is often the case with powerful inventions, schooling has its drawbacks – foremost among them the dulling of many young people’s hunger for independent learning. I’ve thought about these issues ever since I was identified as a troublemaker by my first grade teacher for my inability to sit still and listen to her drone on about knowledge I had already sought out on my own.

TED talks are useful and free ways to bring high-level thinking and through-provoking ideas into the classroom and your home.

Our youth are idle, over educated and out of work. Their fault or ours?

The boring university lecture is going to be the first major casualty of the rise in online learning in higher education, says Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

The custodian of the world's biggest online encyclopaedia says that unless universities respond to the rising tide of online courses new major players will emerge to displace them, in the way that Microsoft arrived from nowhere alongside the personal computer.

In early 2012, the NTEU undertook research into the effects of the ERA upon university staff involved in research. This was an exploratory, multi-method study conducted between April and September 2012 that included a national survey of 39 senior research administrators, eight focus groups at four institutions, eleven recorded and non-recorded interviews at five institutions, and a Workshop in Melbourne that involved 35 Early Career Researchers (ECR).

The study acknowledges that institutional behaviour around research performance is changing, but in ways that take autonomy away from researchers, that rewards managerialism, and thus that undermines the public interest, on the basis that the public interest is understood as delivering Australian society public benefit through a world-class, sustainable and diverse research sector. In particular, the primary concern that the NTEU has with the ERA is its susceptibility to misuse by institutions through poor research management practices, and the risk posed to the intergity of the ‘research fabric’ through attacks on intellectual freedom.