This study examines the global trend in shifting university costs from national governments to individual students and families, with a specific focus on the existing cost-sharing model in Australian higher education. The research examines the manner in which the availability of income-contingent loans (through the Higher Education Contribution…

The use of peer assessment (PA) as an alternative form of evaluation method is reported to be helpful in learning and is increasingly being adopted in higher education settings. Through collecting data from 280 university students in Taiwan, a 20-item instrument was developed to investigate university students' attitudes toward and perceptions of…

The higher education sector is increasingly reliant upon casual ("sessional") staff for teaching and marking purposes. While this practice has been little examined in the past, over the last few years increasing attention has been paid to the quality of marking, mainly because students and academic staff alike are becoming increasingly likely to…

An important purpose of higher social work education is to guide students to acquire and develop social-communicative competencies. The purpose of this study was to investigate the role students' personality characteristics, self-perceived communicative competence and learning conceptions play in the acquisition and development of…

This paper describes the results of a research project that investigated the ways that academics understand sustainability within their own disciplines. It describes a range of ways in which academics view sustainability in the context of their teaching, and a range of ways they suggest that sustainability could be integrated into their teaching.…

In this exploratory study we compare and report two ways in which instructors describe their teaching: (a) thinking about a course they are teaching, (b) thinking about specific classes within that course. Extensive interviews over an extended time provided the data for analysis. At the course level, we analyzed comments about teaching decisions…

South African higher education institutions are increasingly under scrutiny to produce knowledge that is more relevant to South Africa's social and economic needs, more representative of the diversity of its knowledge producers, and more inclusive of the variety of the sites where knowledge is produced. Only a small percentage of South Africans…

In this study, Data Envelopment Analysis is used to measure relative efficiencies of academic departments of an engineering college. Input and output criteria are determined and measured utilizing the academic personnel performance measurement scheme of the College. New measures are developed to compare departments of different disciplines. The…

Teachers' conceptions of teaching, and broad approaches to teaching reported by teachers are both commonly found to range from teaching as information transmission, through to teaching as supporting students' own knowledge constructions. Further, conceptions and approaches have been found to correlate, suggesting that there might be some…

One way in which universities have sought to articulate the outcomes of a university education is through a description of the attributes of their graduates. Recent calls for universities to demonstrate the quality of their outcomes and processes have prompted a re-examination of the generic graduate attribute outcomes many Australian universities…

This paper describes a study designed to test whether situated conceptions of learning can be measured using questionnaires, and the relations between these aspects of students' awareness, their awareness of other environmental variables, and their learning outcomes. A situated conception of learning is one that is evoked and adopted by students…

In this paper we describe a study of learning outcomes at a research-intensive Australian university. Three graduate outcome variables (discipline knowledge and skills, communication and problem solving, and ethical and social sensitivity) are analysed separately using OLS regression and comparisons are made of the patterns of unique contributions…

The purpose of the study was to explore what project-based learning is, what are the pedagogical or psychological motives supporting it, how it has been implemented and what impact it has had on learning in post-secondary education. The study is based on a qualitative review of published articles. The work revealed that the majority of articles on…

In this article I argue that the use of practical reasoning in university classrooms is necessary to establish conditions under which university teachers and students can move beyond the dominant "transmission mode" of education (teaching and learning). This mode of education had been, and in many cases remains to be prevalent in several (South…

This study discusses benchmarking the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in teaching and learning between two universities with different missions: one an Australian campus-based metropolitan university and the other a British distance-education provider. It argues that the differences notwithstanding, it is possible to…