Two articles dealing with different dimensions of student learning are discussed for their contemporary relevance. The first, "Culturally mixed groups on international campuses: An opportunity for intercultural learning" by Simone Volet and Grace Ang (1998), examines the factors that encourage students to gravitate towards co-nationals rather than…

Ever since he stumbled into doing higher education research as a young academic in the 1980s, the author has been trying to understand it as a "field" of study. His career, as a former business lecturer, then an academic developer and now an associate professor for higher education working in an Education Faculty has given him opportunities to see…

Many teachers see major difficulties in maintaining academic standards in today's larger and more diversified classes. The problem becomes more tractable if learning outcomes are seen as more a function of students' activities than of their fixed characteristics. The teacher's job is then to organise the teaching/learning context so that all…

One of the major educational goals of the internationalisation of higher education is to prepare students to function in an international and inter-cultural context. Cultural diversity on university campuses creates ideal social forums for inter-cultural learning, yet, one of the most disturbing aspects of the internationalisation of higher…

For many years universities around the world have sought to articulate the nature of the education they offer to their students through a description of the generic qualities and skills their graduates possess. Despite the lengthy history of the rhetoric of such policy claims, universities' endeavours to describe generic attributes of graduates…

"Higher Education Research & Development" ("HERD") was established to address a perceived gap in higher education publishing: research of interest to practitioners that was engagingly written. After 30 years of contributing to the field, "HERD" has constructed a unique position for itself among higher education journals. This paper reviews the…

In this article, the author comments on two highly cited articles and how they link to wider trends in higher education research. The two papers in question, Angela Brew's article from 2003, "Teaching and research: New relationships and their implications for inquiry-based teaching and learning in higher education" and Gerlese Akerlind's article…

What is it to learn for an unknown future? It might be said that the future has always been unknown but this question surely takes on a new pedagogical challenge in the contemporary age. Generic skills may seem to offer the basis of just such a learning for an unknown future. Generic skills, by definition, are those that surely hold across…

This article explores the wicked problem of quality in higher education, arguing for a more robust theorising of the subject at national, institutional and local department level. The focus of the discussion rests on principles for theorising in more rigorous ways about the multidimensional issue of quality. Quality in higher education is proposed…

"Wicked" issues are one-off problems that have no algorithms to follow to solutions. They are ill-understood or understood in multiple, perhaps conflicting, ways and are fundamentally complex in character. This paper argues that the term is an apt one to describe many aspects of the relationship between theory and data in educational research, and…

This paper contributes to the critical engagement about educational development and its status as a field. The critique focuses in particular on our knowledge and the nature of our knowledge-building. The paper argues that unless we strengthen our knowledge base we will not emerge as a professional field able to engage rigorously and…

In this article, the role of theory in higher education research is problematised using a communities of practice framework. Drawing on a case study derived from the author's own published work and doctoral study, the article concludes that the differential uses of theory within communities of research practice can be fruitfully explored, in part,…

This article describes a small scale ethnographically oriented research study seeking to contribute to understanding student academic literacy practices in a South African vocational, web design and development course. In this course digital multimodal assessments are the main means whereby students demonstrate their learning. The findings of the…

This article addresses the problem of making programme evaluation sufficiently meaningful and cognisant of context such that practitioners, in this case of academic development, can gain new understandings of their situation in order to improve their practice. In order to do this, the paper uses Archer's morphogenetic framework to deepen the…

The increased diversity in the student body resulting from massification poses particular challenges to higher education. This article engages the uncritical use of the "disadvantage" discourse and its effect on pedagogy. It explores some of the challenges of coping with student diversity, with particular reference to the South African context.…