Corruption in the system of higher education in Russia is a barrier to fair access to the labor market for educated specialists, and a survey of programs to combat this type of corruption shows that it needs to be taken more seriously as a problem.

Russian universities do not do well in international rankings. Recent attempts in Russia to create different forms of ranking are aimed at reflecting what strengths universities there may have, but it is up to the universities themselves to find ways to better characterize themselves in existing systems of ranking.

Comparative research data show that there is both a high level of ecological concern and a high level of ecological passivity among students in Russia, indicating that their ecological culture exists only on the symbolic level. The "green" culture of American college students, in contrast to that of Russia's college students, has…

Research data from a survey of young people in the Dagestan region of Russia show that there is a complex interaction between religious and national identities and allegiances.

The poor fit between the specialties and employment opportunities of university graduates in Russia requires rethinking the way that higher education in Russia operates. Russia's economic future, and avoiding social unrest due to high unemployment or underemployment, is dependent on changing the education-employment linkages.

Salaries and workplace conditions of teachers and researchers in Russian higher education are a barrier to recruitment of new staff, a source of loss as they move to better-paying occupations, and the cause of an aging professoriate. Laws to deal with this issue are constantly being passed, but the situation remains critical

The Quality Control (QC) Guidelines are intended to increase the efficiency, precision, and accuracy of the scoring, analysis, and reporting process of testing. The QC Guidelines focus on large-scale testing operations where multiple forms of tests are created for use on set dates. However, they may also be used for a wide variety of other testing…

In many schools and businesses today, the pressure to produce results is far greater than attention to employee learning. If continued learning impacts service for business customers and their communities, then what lessons can be learned from business to support and advocate for educator learning? This article is a collection of lessons learned…

This article offers a critical reflection on the contemporary Open Educational Resource (OER) movement, its unquestioned investment in a collective "content fetish" and an educational "problem description" that focuses on issues of scarcity, access, and availability of quality materials. It also argues that OER proponents fail…

The potential benefits of OER have led many European governments to implement policies supporting their creation and use. This chapter aims to put these OER policies in context, discussing their focus and scope and highlighting challenges and bottlenecks. On the basis of the analysis of the current state of the art, it is argued that one of main…

#PhDChat is an online network of individuals that has its roots to a group of UK doctoral students who began using Twitter in 2010 to hold discussions. Since then, the network around #PhDchat has evolved and grown. In this study, we examine this network using a mixed methods analysis of the tweets that were labeled with the hashtag over a…

Much of the current literature related to Open Educational Resource (OER) development and practice concentrates on higher education, although a growing body of work is also emerging for the primary and secondary school sectors. This article examines the user perspectives of teachers and teacher educators, regarding: discovery of teaching…

This article presents an overview of the development and use of analytics in the context of education. Using Buckingham Shum's three levels of analytics, the authors present a critical analysis of current developments in the domain of learning analytics, and contrast the potential value of analytics research and development with real world…

Read/write social technologies enable rich pedagogies that centre on sharing and constructing content but have two notable weaknesses. Firstly, beyond the safe, nurturing environment of closed groups, students participating in more or less public network- or set-oriented communities may be insecure in their knowledge and skills, leading to…

Learning does not stop when an individual leaves formal education, but becomes increasingly informal, and deeply embedded within other activities such as work. This article describes the challenges of informal learning in knowledge intensive industries, highlighting the important role of personal learning networks. The article argues that…