Thomas Edison State College (TESC) and Colorado State University (CSU) offer significant contrasts in institutional culture, student demographics, faculty and institutional priorities and approaches to distance education course development and delivery. This article offers case studies showing that widely disparate program design and delivery…

Quality assurance in higher education has been an important issue not only in western countries but also in China. This study, based on Harman's framework, analyses the features and implementation of undergraduate teaching evaluation (UTE) through case studies of four different universities in Guangdong province, southern China. The findings…

Online asynchronous courses constitute a significant portion of Tulane University's School of Continuing Studies (SCS) curriculum. Online instruction is sufficiently important to the School of Continuing Studies that it merited special attention in the form of a two-year review to ensure its quality. The review identified and implemented different…

To boost the social and economic outlook of the country, Turkey has recently initiated educational reform at all levels and especially higher education, including organizational restructuring and expansion for increased accessibility. The swift increase in the number and size of universities has resulted in a challenge to find trained faculty. One…

The success of the US economy has always been its ability to innovate, create, invent, and commercialize groundbreaking discoveries. Today, Americans seem to be losing their edge and have begun to suffer an "innovation deficit." The authors say re-engineering the entire US educational system in order to foster and enhance necessary creativity and…

After its recent Assurance visit from HEFCE, Oxford went through a high profile public debate at the end of which its academic community voted against moving to a governance structure which would have given Oxford a majority of external members on its Council. The Higher Education Funding Council asked Oxford to answer eight questions justifying…

Many college and university summer session deans and directors face significant challenges in providing quality summer courses. At research institutions, for example, the number of regular tenured and tenure-track faculty who want to focus on research, scholarship, and other activities during summer, affects the composition of the summer session…

Faculty instructional time is a critical resource at all universities, but particularly in a major research institution like Harvard. Operating on the periphery of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard's division of Continuing Education is often at a disadvantage when attempting to recruit senior faculty. However, through its distance…

Explores the reasons behind the ubiquity of managerial ethics among academics whose own teaching and research often critiques those same values. Discusses the ways in which academics either promote or supinely acquiesce to managerialist processes and the consequences of this for educational values. (EV)

Explored the extent to which policies and practices promoting work-life balance (family friendly policies) have been taken up within the English higher education sector. Responses from 50 higher education institutions show that flexible working practices are more widespread than the formal policies of institutions would suggest. (SLD)

Presents a personal view of the development of Britain's new Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences. Discusses efforts to ensure that the new organization is inclusive, reflects balance in a number of ways, and is capable of self-reform to meet changing circumstances in the future. (EV)

Surveyed British academics, hypothesizing that the effect of Britain's Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) on individual academics is dependent on their self-assessed level of research activity. Found that the RAE's effect does appear to be dependent on level of research activity, with moderately active researchers the most influenced to increase…

Surveyed academics for the impact of Britain's Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), an assessment and funding mechanism, on their research behavior. Compared results to an earlier study (McNay, 1997) for significant differences. Found that the RAE time scale and the perceived preferences of RAE panel members are increasingly influencing choice of…

The June 1999 Bett report was a major review of academic staff pay in United Kingdom higher education. This article examines problems with the system of pay determination currently in operation, the background and main proposals of the Bett committee concerning collective bargaining reform, employers' responses to Bett and unions' positions, and…

Describes a project in which participating faculty used a videotaped teaching session to observe and reflect on the theoretical underpinnings of their classroom decision making, the extent to which they are meeting their own perceptions and expectations of themselves as high-quality teachers, and the ways in which they might improve. (EV)