With this paper, we explore early placement experiences and their pedagogical potential, including ways of keeping students enrolled and persisting with their studies. Few university courses offer early placements because traditionally placement experiences have a focus on employability and work readiness of graduates, hence occur towards the end…

Universities in the English-speaking world share a common ancestry that extends back to medieval times. From these beginnings universities quickly developed distinctive qualities as they became integrated within different social and cultural systems of their home societies. A number of comparisons of higher education research have shown major…

Both lecture delivery and Facebook use are ubiquitous aspects of higher education from staff and student points-of-view, respectively. An attempt was made to integrate the two by setting up a Facebook group and delivering contemporary news stories in preparation for in-lecture discussion in a large-scale (1,200 students across 5 sections)…

In introducing the special issue on "Large Class Pedagogy: Opportunities and Challenges of Massification" the present editorial takes stock of the emerging literature on this subject. We seek to contribute to the massificaiton debate by considering one result of it: large class teaching in higher education. Here we look to large classes…

Marketisation, increased student mobility, the massification of Higher Education (HE) and stagnating staff numbers in universities have combined to cause a ripple effect of change both in the demography and size of university classes across the world. This has implications for the quality and equity of learning and the need to examine and to…

As in many universities, class sizes have increased more quickly than teaching and learning resources. A related challenge is the increasing diversity of the student body in terms of socio-economic background, learning styles, English language ability and preparedness. This paper explores ways in which traditional face-to-face teaching methods…

In South Africa and in other parts of the world, many professions are bemoaning the poor ability of many graduates to communicate their skills and knowledge effectively once they enter the workplace. Increasingly, pressure is placed on higher education to do more in terms of equipping future professionals with the necessary critical reading,…

Constructive alignment has emerged as a powerful curriculum design idea, but little is known of the extent to which the effectiveness of this idea is a function of qualitative variation. This article introduces a model of qualitative variation in constructive alignment, and uses the results from known alignment studies to test the model. The…

Large classes have increasingly become a feature in many countries around the world. This paper presents a two-pronged analysis of this phenomenon, drawing on the political economy of higher education as well as the sociology of knowledge to contribute to a principled discussion about why we have large classes, and when a large class is too large.…

Research on teaching from a student learning perspective has identified two qualitatively different approaches to university teaching. They are an information transmission and teacher-focused approach, and a conceptual change and student-focused approach. The fundamental difference being in the former the intention is to transfer information to…

The problem which this paper addresses is the difficulty of knowing students in large diverse classes in pedagogically useful ways. The paper discusses how the phenomenographic methodology can be employed to address this problem. It describes how phenomenographic studies and their results can enable teachers to "know their students" at a…

An investigation was undertaken into how a process involving peer review and observation of teaching can be used to enhance academics' teaching practices and inform professional development activities at an organization level. We describe an innovative and highly structured approach to gathering evidence of pedagogic practice from academic…

In this article I examine the role of the contemporary university in light of the mass increase in class sizes that has occurred on an international scale. While we may look nostalgically back to a time when lectures numbered a few hundred students and tutorials had as few as ten, massification at undergraduate level is an inescapable fact of…

This study investigated an under-explored area in the field of academic practice: the meaning of the complex notion of authenticity in teaching. Combining conceptual with empirical investigation, data included philosophical texts, repertory grid interviews with fifty-five lecturers and students from Law, Physics and English Literature, and…

This study investigates the perceptions of higher education students, recent graduates and employers in Vietnam on the issue of skill development in the higher education system in Vietnam. Enhancing skill development is considered essential for students, not only to pursue their study, but also for their success later, at work and in life. The…