Retaining students until they complete their qualifications is one of the main aims of many higher education institutions. Retention of students is also looked at from different perspectives in the literature. This small, exploratory, narrative enquiry research looks into the experiences of twenty-one domestic students during their first year and…

Continuous increase of global reliance on sessional staff in higher education has not been accompanied by the development of strategies to enhance quality learning and teaching or understanding the experiences of these staff. This has resulted in a general discontent among this category of academics. The growing importance of building respectful…

The provision of academic language and learning (ALL) support to undergraduate and postgraduate students has been a staple across higher education institutions in Australia and New Zealand for some time. However, research has established that there are multiple challenges inherent to working across institutional spaces in the ways that ALL staff…

Tutors in higher education are receiving and responding to student disclosures that include racism, anxiety, loneliness, legal disputes, family upheavals, physical, emotional, and mental health, bereavement, legal battles, and harassment. In many cases, this caring aspect of the tutor role is not acknowledged, allocated time in job descriptions,…

In University life, the first women to achieve status or leadership positions inevitably are perceived as role models to their colleagues, peers and students. Role model theory suggests that although we generally understand the meaning of terms such as "role model" or "mentor", the position of role model has several dimensions…

Responses to COVID-19 impacts have shown how quickly universities can change, given the impetus. However, global disruptions to university learning and teaching have not yet been matched by any significant change to university leadership. Taking gender equity as our focus, we argue that pedagogical disruption should extend beyond the classroom to…

Student attendance has long polarized the higher education sector with reports of no to little effect on student success to positive relationships between attendance frequency at face to face and synchronous online lectures and better student engagement and achievement. This study investigates the impact of embedded online activities during…

At a time of transition into adulthood, tertiary study places additional stresses on the mental wellbeing of students. The continual assessment, long teaching hours, and expectation of professionalism that is expected from students within clinical programmes places even more burden on these students. Then in 2020, with the COVID-19 lockdown, there…

Distance or online learning is more than simply uploading and delivering learning resources to learners but in fact, it is a process that provides learners with autonomy, responsibility, flexibility and choice. This can be a challenge for many academic teachers. In 2020, as universities globally shifted to online learning, in response to the…

One impact of the global pandemic of 2020 was a rapid shift in the delivery of work-integrated learning (WIL) to remote activity among WIL practitioners, students and educators alike. Along with professional practice research in higher degrees, WIL practice, including placements and non-placements, responded actively and sometimes reactively to…

Universities globally have continued to strategically increase work-integrated learning (WIL) opportunities for students to enhance graduate employability. However, meeting the needs of the increasing number of placements in industry settings places challenges on employers and academic programme coordinators. This paper examines an innovative…

This paper adds to the nascent literature on teaching research methods and what students learn from courses and assessment. Postgraduate students are often confronted with large amounts of reading, and the content of material can be intimidating. Convincing them also to engage critically with readings is even more difficult. We report on a…

Preparing students to be critical thinkers and effective communicators is essential in today's multinational and technologically sophisticated environment. New electronic technologies provide opportunities for creating learning environments that extend the possibilities of "old" but still essential technologies: books, blackboards, and…

Learning advisors provide academic literacy development support in a variety of configurations, ranging from one-on-one consultations through to large-scale lectures. Such lectures can be generic, stand-alone modules or embedded within a discipline-specific course. Pragmatic and institutional considerations suggest that a generic model of delivery…

Within the New Zealand university context, there has been a dramatic shift in the demographics of doctoral programs. Moving from an elitist educational environment to one that includes a variety of students from different cultures and educational and linguistic backgrounds has meant that "traditional" doctoral study, in which a student…