International education is widely recognised as providing a range of positive outcomes for students, universities, and both the source and destination countries. New Zealand politicians, however, see international education as a means of generating significant export earnings able to subsidise the local provision of university education. New…

Virtual reality technology has made significant advances and is now widely recognised for its potential to provide fully immersive experiences that have relevance to many aspects of life, including education. This paper explores the effectiveness of VR technology for situated experiential education by adopting a user experience (UX) theoretical…

Internationally, first-year student experience surveys suggest that modern students are investing increasingly less time in their study at university, raising concerns about the impact this may have on their success. This paper describes a case study exploring student workload at a New Zealand university interested in understanding how student…

Despite increasing scholarly interest in tertiary student perceptions of plagiarism, very little is known about those held by postgraduate (PG) students, although differences between undergraduate (UG) and PG students relate to both their characteristics and the demands of their studies. Furthermore, there is a dearth of research within the…

Sense-making is a process of engaging with complex and dynamic environments that provides organisations and their leaders with a flexible and agile model of the world. The seven key properties of sense-making describe a process that is social and that respects the range of different stakeholders in an organisation. It also addresses the need to…

New Zealand, like many countries, faces the challenge of building and sustaining an educated population. Particular challenges are posed by the need to educate an increasing proportion of the population to higher levels in order to support the growth of a modern skills and knowledge economy, as opposed to an economy built on low-cost labour and…

Virtual reality is widely recognized as offering the potential for fully immersive environments. This paper introduces a framework that guides the creation and analysis of immersive environments that are pedagogically structured to support situated and experiential education. The "situated experiential education environment" framework…

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) represent a potentially exciting opportunity to use technology to realise many of the long-promised benefits of universal higher education. While there are many positive aspects to the MOOCs on offer and in development, there are also significant ethical concerns arising from various initiatives. These include…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the development of Viet Nam's approach to higher education quality assurance during the past dozen years since its establishment, focusing on the achievements and challenges. Design/methodology/approach: This is a desktop analysis study. The paper analyses the policies and practices related to…

Over an 18-month period four New Zealand educational institutions--a university, a private tertiary enterprise, a wananga, and an institute of technology/polytechnic--have engaged in a process of change influenced by technology. Their e-learning capability was benchmarked using the E-Learning Maturity Model, and this information was used to…

Technology and change are so closely related that the use of the word innovation seems synonymous with technology in many contexts, including that of higher education. This paper contends that university culture and existing capability constrain such innovation and to a large extent determine the nature and extent of organisational change. In the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss and demonstrate the relevance of a new conceptual framework for leading and managing the development of learning and teaching to e.learning strategy development. Design/methodology/approach: After reviewing and discussing the research literature on e.learning in higher education institutions from…

Purpose: This paper aims to share the University of Strathclyde's experience of embedding research-based education for sustainable development (RBESD) within its undergraduate curricula through the use of an innovative pedagogy called Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP), originated at Georgia Institute of Technology. Design/methodology/approach:…

Technology and change are so closely related that the use of the word innovation seems synonymous with technology in many contexts, including that of higher education. This paper contends that university culture and existing capability constrain such innovation and to a large extent determine the nature and extent of organisational change. In the…

The E-Learning Maturity Model (eMM) is a quality improvement framework designed to help institutional leaders assess their institution's e-learning maturity. This paper reviews the eMM, drawing on examples of assessments conducted in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the USA to show how it helps institutional leaders assess and compare their…