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This paper explores the digitalisation of teaching and learning understood as external processes, influenced by government and international trends and as internal processes within the institutions, in Denmark and Norway. These are countries with similarities regarding digitalisation and educational systems. In the internal processes, there was some use of digital technology in teaching and learning when initiated from administration including IT-staff, in collaboration with academic leaders. There was little or only limited reported use of technology for teaching and learning, when the processes were initiated by administration together with enthusiasts among faculty staff, who did not have leadership roles or influence on change. There was more reported use of technology in teaching and learning in Denmark than Norway. The paper discusses possible explanations for these findings and thus illuminates how processes of digitalisation are influenced by broader governance arrangements, institutional maturity and academic and administration staffs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how university staff in Denmark, Germany, and England perceived higher education (HE) policy as impacting the experience of being a student in their respective countries. While, in each nation, different policy mechanisms were identified as having triggered transformations in the experience of being a student, the transformations themselves were described in a strikingly similar manner across all three countries: staff stressed that students had become more instrumental in their approach to learning; that the student experience had become more circumscribed; and that students were under greater stress. We analyse how staff's narratives about the impact of policy on the experience of being a student were mediated by their own ideas about what constituted 'good education', which in turn were strongly rooted in national traditions. Furthermore, in each country, staff's assessment of the impact of specific policies on HE differed sharply from those of policy actors. Our findings contribute to the scholarship on the marketisation of HE, through drawing attention to how the rationality underpinning policy does not determine how it is engaged with by key stakeholders on the ground, and by demonstrating how the neoliberalisation of HE can unfold in different formats, some more explicit than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities have a long history of change in learning and teaching to suit various government initiatives and institutional priorities. Academic developers now are frequently required to address strategic learning and teaching priorities. This paper asks how, in such a context, academic developers can ensure that work they do in relation to one specific institutional priority can support future learning and teaching strategies. Two examples of efforts to integrate research and teaching are discussed to demonstrate the length of time needed to develop institutional understanding and how to create sustainable resources to meet the needs of changing initiatives. The paper highlights the importance of a sustainable approach to ever-changing learning and teaching priorities, suggesting that resources and other work developed to meet institutional initiatives should be structured so that they can be readily reused or adapted when policies change. The paper concludes by drawing out some implications for academic development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The use and creation of Open Education Resources (OER) is becoming increasingly prevalent with teachers and learning designers at universities around the world. OER allows educators to create content and make their content available to the world under an open licence, and also provides the opportunity to use and adapt other OER content. Whilst the use and creation of OER in tertiary institutions is not yet considered the 'norm', many jurisdictions around the world have taken steps, to fund, support and encourage the use of OER in their educational institutions. The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) has developed an Open Education (OE) initiative to support the use and creation of OER at QUT. Policy is often the foundation stone, which supports progress and change. The underlying policy provides the framework and often points to the legal parameters that guide the objectives of the project or movement. The importance of policy is evident in the way in which QUT has developed and implemented an OE initiative to promote and support the creation and use of OER. This paper considers the history and development of OER, using QUT's OE initiative as an example of the ways in which policy and implementation can lead to positive change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationalisation is a key element in the evolving role and function of the UK higher education (HE) sector. Its perceived benefits are promoted widely and sought assiduously. It has come to be believed by many practitioners that internationalisation and the quest for quality and status in HE are synonymous. In the current phase of internationalisation considerable emphasis is being placed on the student experience, and a dominant factor in that experience is the quality of the teaching provision. This paper is intended, through a historical analysis of both the HE sector in the UK and the evolution of internationalisation as interpreted in the western developed world, to contextualise the current perspective of universities on this topic and consequently the requirements placed on those responsible for teaching and learning. This analysis has been undertaken through primary and secondary texts with more contemporary references made to the media debate. Evidence suggests that it has always been apparent that the UK university sector and its responses to change are frequently reliant on, or influenced by, the decisions made by government. The issue of internationalisation, for obvious reasons, is more dependent on government policy than is any other. Teaching and learning in the university sector are therefore more closely aligned to national policy at present than may have been the case in recent times, and this is the policy context in which the article is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues for a more nuanced perspective on learning that takes account of the real and situated contexts of student experience. It is presented against a backdrop of the agenda to widen participation in higher education (HE) in the UK, which has led to a rise in students from non-traditional backgrounds entering into HE. Responding to this, an argument is made in favour of widening 'capability' in learning, to produce a more socially just pedagogy. Drawing on examples of the student learning experience a series of reflections is produced from an undergraduate programme of education studies. Such reflections, linking personal knowledge with wider social and cultural practices, are used to produce notions of 'cultural wealth' across informal and formal learning contexts. It is argued that by creating choice and freedoms in student learning the exclusivity of university education may be challenged and a more socially just pedagogy usefully considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographic research in a further education college (College X) between 2000 and 2005 was designed to uncover the impact of the Common Inspection Framework (the inspection framework for all post-16 non-higher education and training) on the Observation of Teaching and Learning (OTL) process within the college. Such research indicated that the assumption of narrow pedagogies by observers of teaching, in line with the expectations of the college observation policy, had minimised the effectiveness of the process because it caused OTL to become neo-Fordist and micropolitical in nature rather than a means for lecturer development. This was the product of top-down policy and procedure within College X, but also an over-controlling local Learning and Skills Council (LSC) and Ofsted inspection framework which limited the extent to which senior managers were able to accommodate different learning contexts within the OTL process. The clear implication of research in College X was that improvements in teaching and learning require inspection and observation processes to focus on subject-specific pedagogy and professional values rather than bureaucratic procedures and narrow pedagogies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Success in open educational resources (OER) has been reported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA and the Open University in the UK, among others. It is unclear, however, how valuable OER are in learning and teaching. Approaches to OER policy and sustainability are just two other key aspects that remain unresolved across the sector. Based on the findings from the Open, Transferable, Technology-enabled Educational Resources (OTTER) project at the University of Leicester, UK,1 we introduce the OER mix framework: purpose, processes, product, and policy. We argue that different mixes of the four Ps can generate different approaches to OER. We discuss the relevance of the framework and its importance for social inclusion and widening access to higher education. We also discuss the implications of the OER mix for the openness agenda. Institutions may find value in adapting and applying the framework. We invite colleagues to critique it and report back. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between higher education and vocational education and training in Australia is under discussion as a result of the Bradley Review of Higher Education. This reform process, which is intended to create a more inclusive, mass tertiary education sector, has significant implications for VET. This article examines the implications of this reform agenda for pedagogy and the different knowledge traditions that are conveyed through learning cultures, which have developed differently in higher education and VET. We draw on recent theorisations of craft and craftsmanship to critique the persistence of the mental-manual division of knowing that underpins relations between VET and university learning. Approaching craft as an integrated form of knowing, we suggest that VET pedagogy supports the development of 'knowing practice' and recognises open conceptions of knowledge that can engage learners who, traditionally, have not gone to university. We argue that the distinctive learning cultures associated with VET may be at risk in an emerging tertiary education landscape where current debates about knowledge and knowing privilege intellectual ability and are often blind to other forms of knowledge and knowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creativity, content, and policy have multiple relationships. Creativity and disciplinary content are inextricably linked. In dealing with creativity, the first education policy choice is whether to recognize and act on that fact. Care is needed in using the term creativity in advocacy contexts, lest the relationship between creativity and content become obscured or forgotten altogether. Creativity is central to the arts, and thus arts education is a natural curricular place to develop creativity. However, the development of creative potential requires work over time. Creativity development in all fields requires serious sustained study and practice with certain goals in mind. Other kinds of study may be valuable, but they will not develop creativity. If we want to develop creative potential in schools, we must want the necessary structures and means for its development as much as we want the results. A number of major adjustments are required. Necessary means include the provision of environments that philosophically and operationally support creativity, increased respect for local knowledge, and altered approaches to assessment and evaluation. Major policy decisions face us. Can we make the adjustments necessary? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of technology to support learning in institutions of Further and Higher Education has become almost ubiquitous. Institutions normally start with strategies aimed at introducing these innovations, but there is much about the organisational and cultural nature of educational institutions that acts as a barrier to innovation. Staffordshire University started this process in 1997, and by 2002 reached a point where innovation had slowed and the embedding of what had been achieved was at best partial. An embedding process based around the review and implementation of policy ensued which, by 2005, had proved highly successful in terms of embedding, but due to cultural and organisational factors, this had been at the expense of sustaining innovation and had created tensions within the organisation. This was compounded by changes in technology and the advent of new web-based services, which stimulated innovative practitioners. New initiatives to address the tensions between the need of the organisation to control its processes and the needs of practitioners to experiment and innovate have begun. These have highlighted the requirement for tools to enable strategy and policy to be considered against the processes making up the learning experience in terms of ownership and control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]