University Sector Research Articles

The Role of Parents in Influencing Student’s Satisfaction: A Perspective of Teachers from Public and Private Sector Colleges of Pakistan

The role of teachers in facilitating the development of improved circumstances has been identified as the main factor determining feasibility. The primary categorization in this regard pertains to their perception of parental involvement in order to improve student satisfaction. Objective: To assess the perceptions of teachers in public and private sector colleges in Pakistan on the role of parents and their involvement in impacting student satisfaction. Method: The study design chosen for this research is qualitative research and the data collection technique is interview. A total of 10 participants were included in this research and the participants were teachers who have been working in public and private sector colleges in Pakistan. The data analysis approach taken for this study is thematic analysis. Results: A total of 5 themes are included and it is found that factors that impact student satisfaction and performance include; student independence, promoting a learning environment at home, time management, offering positive reinforcement, emotional support, parental communication, active listening, and encouraging curiosity. It is also found that perceptions of parents on public and private colleges are linked to income, resources support, socioeconomic factors, education level of parents, and quality of education, and the challenges faced by teachers in building teacher-parent positive relationships comprise of lack of awareness, unrealistic expectations, language barriers, and cultural factors. Conclusions: It is addressed that the role of parents in impacting student satisfaction is significant according to teacher's perception in private and public colleges in Pakistan.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Different English Language Teaching Strategies in Public Sector Education: A Mixed-Methods Approach

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Different English Language Teaching Strategies in Public Sector Education: A Mixed-Methods Approach

Non-Indigenous Initial Teacher Education students navigating the cultural interface

ABSTRACT Despite strong policy impetus to embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content across all levels of education in Australia, it is frequently reported that these aims are not being met. Settler ignorance and resistance are key contributing factors. However, recently, in our experiences teaching Initial Teacher Education (ITE) courses in the university sector, we found students who are, without being required to, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content into their lesson plans, representing a shift from this dominant discourse about teachers and students. In this small-scale qualitative study, we sought to expand the dialogue from why non-Indigenous teachers do not include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content to a strengths-based understanding of why others do. Using ‘yarning’ approaches we interviewed four non-Indigenous ITE students to understand the factors that shaped their decisions and how they navigated the cultural interface. We put forward that students felt morally compelled to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content in their lessons. They were deeply concerned with ethics, actively positioned themselves as ‘learners’ and privileged First Nations voices to mitigate their positioning as non-Indigenous teachers. We conclude with implications for policy responses and questions about institutional responsibility.

Study Abroad at an Ontario College: Towards More Accessible and Inclusive Programming

Despite Canada’s success in attracting international students to its postsecondary campuses, it sends very few domestic students abroad, and especially so from its college sector. This paper offers a brief overview of Canada’s policy approach to study abroad, literature review on students’ participation in study abroad, and outcomes of a study on students’ (perceived) barriers at a college in Ontario, Canada. Students at the college were surveyed to examine their attitudes towards study abroad participation and their perceived barriers regarding study abroad. The study found that students were overwhelmingly interested in study abroad but perceived strong barriers to participation, findings which are consistent with the literature: financial, academic, social/familial barriers, and accessibility, safety, and support concerns. These findings suggest that through expansion of national programming, coordination of provincial strategy, and inclusive, accessible policies and programming at the institutional level, more college students will be able to receive the many documented benefits of study abroad experiences.

“Nousferatu”: Are corporate consultants extracting the lifeblood from universities?

Universities and management consultants are locked in a danse macabre. We turn to the vampire genre to elaborate on the relationship of consulting companies to the university sector, focusing on the University of Alberta in Canada and Monash University in Australia. We are academics with long experience of the consequences of change management and the employment of consultants in universities. Deb is sufficiently “long in the tooth” that her entire career spans the period of heightened government and private sector intervention in Australian universities that began in the late 1980s and more recently she has had the experience of watching this process occur again, at speed, in Canada. Ben is a representative of the National Tertiary Education Union at Australia’s largest university. He is also an experienced journalist who has reported on Australian higher education and public policy for more than two decades. The essay argues that consultants and universities are engaged in a mutually dependent relationship designed to sustain each other at the expense of the public.

Four short stories on CMU

“Four Short Stories on CMU” presents an account of how Canadian Mennonite University embodies the significance of its mandate. Seeking to resist common bifurcations of “real university” and “faith-based university,” Cheryl Pauls takes inspiration in a phrase from CMU’s mission statement, “innovative Christian university.” In exploring the provocative potential of the phrase’s blend of inventiveness and faithfulness, Pauls draws connections across the university’s Four Commitments, their theological impulses, the substance of CMU education programs and scholarship, and dimensions of growing relevance to Canadian universities today. Through glimpses into the development and character of CMU, Pauls makes a case for the vitality of theologically generated impulses within the university sector today.

An exploration of African-student agency: Placing students from historically disadvantaged communities at the centre

At the national universities within South Africa, various events during the past years indicate that students suffer under different kinds of oppression. It is widely acknowledged that students from poor, rural geographical areas find the university space alienating and not speaking to their life worlds. In this paper I respond to Fataar’s (2019) notion of the “misrecognised” university student in the South African context. My focus on students coming from historically disadvantaged communities aims to contribute to ongoing debates about social justice for students in the university sector. The problem to be addressed in this paper is the misalignment between the critical horizontal knowledge ofhistorically disadvantaged students and the knowledge codes of the university relating to learning, curriculum, and pedagogical practices. I therefore argue that if university institutional practices recognise, embrace, and align with students’ agency, resilience and adaption, a reframed institutional platform could engage students in their intellectual becoming. Furthermore, I am guided by two questions: 1) How can students from historically disadvantaged communities use their critical horizontal knowledges to connect with disciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge of the university to enhance critical specialised consciousness in the becoming of ethical humans? and 2) How can an African theorisation of student agency form the basis to consciously reframe the core institutional function of the university? In responding to these questions, I locate my arguments in African-student agency, reviewing literature by African scholars to gain an understanding of the African concept of student agency.

University learning style model: Bibliometrics and systematic literature review

The university learning style worldwide was analyzed to obtain a model adapted to Peru, that was complemented in the initial part with the study of the biliometric analysis. In the first steps that were developed, the information search was done in a general way with Scopus. Then specifically adding the Dimensions database, obtaining 59 items from the selection. The Prism statement was used, which allowed it to be developed in the methodology sequentially until the selected articles were obtained. The objective was to carry out a study of the systematic review of the literature (RSL) that allowed analysis by categories such as academic performance, teaching strategy and competencies related to the learning style. Where the data obtained was with the use of VOSviewer and Rstudio. The result obtained was an innovative model that relates the categories with the most relevant models that studied the learning style. As a conclusion, the different learning styles can be adapted to the different study programs and their different courses to plan it from the macrocurricular to the microcurricular, taking into account the strategy and the didactics of teaching, the contribution for the university sector.

Models of knowledge

Art practice has an unusual history inside the university sector. Often originating from specialized academies, as disciplines they usually began life through a focus on practical work. This gave rise to small institutions that have been subsumed into larger ones, becoming colleges or schools within universities rather than continuing their independent lives. The advantages of this are clear: structural, financial and cultural opportunities that come with the status of university subjects. What this article argues is that there has been a considerable price to pay in being so accommodated. Creative practice subjects in a qualifications framework, and to some extent in exercises like the Research Excellence Framework, have been required to adopt intellectual enquiry processes in order to burnish their claims to knowledge. Mostly, these come from the humanities. This article examines the impact of this on creative practice, on acceptance of the research elements of it and on distinguishing the difference between arts-based enquiry and humanities models of interpretation and analysis. That these are increasingly incompatible requires rethinking of the relationship between arts and humanities that is so taken for granted.

Adaptive leadership in urban community colleges: Meeting new challenges through new ways of thinking

AbstractThe COVID‐19 pandemic illuminated the need for urban community colleges to utilize an adaptive leadership approach to thrive during times of uncertainty. Adaptive leaders encourage team members to address problems through new ways of thinking to meet organizational goals. The community college sector, especially institutions in urban environments, has utilized adaptive leadership throughout its history to best meet the needs of its students. It is against this background that urban community colleges adapted to the COVID‐19 pandemic by reconceptualizing career programs to be completed in virtual spaces, hosting COVID‐19 testing and vaccination centers on campus, and ensuring that students had access to faculty and staff in a digital learning environment. In this chapter, we highlight the importance of adaptive leadership in urban community colleges and provide examples from urban community college leaders on how they utilize adaptive leadership to meet new challenges.

The Need for Occupational Therapy Evidence-Based Education

Knowledge of evidence-based-education principles is essential for occupational therapy academics and fieldwork supervisors to ensure the teaching and learning methods and strategies being used are informed, targeted, cost effective, contemporary, and worthwhile. This paper defines evidence-based-education is and how it can be applied in the context of occupational therapy student academic and fieldwork education. The factors that impact occupational therapy evidence-based education in the university sector are introduced which have the potential to ensure that students obtain a quality, meaningful, value-for-money, and high impact education in both academic and fieldwork environments. It is recommended that university faculty and fieldwork supervisors use, create, support, and disseminate evidence-based-education related findings with continued debate and investigation are recommended.

Universities in a contested space: The dominance of calculative accounting practices and the development of a research agenda

AbstractOver the last few decades, neoliberal, managerial, reforms have dominated the university sector in a number of different countries. Calculative practices, including performance measures and indicators, have spread and targets, in terms of research outputs and increasing student numbers in order to generate “profit”, have become the norm, despite the many voices seeing this as often clashing with the mission of universities to create knowledge and contribute to social development. The paper provides an overview of the changing focus on how universities have been managed over time and, at the same time, of the emergence and measurementof Public Value themes in the university sector. A future research agenda is proposed for those interested in the study of the university sector, together with possibleresearch questions to further this area.

Pay transparency intervention and the gender pay gap: Evidence from research‐intensive universities in the UK

AbstractThis study investigates the impact of a pay transparency intervention in reducing the gender pay gap in the UK university sector. Introduced in 2007, the initiative enabled public access to average annual earnings disaggregated by gender in UK universities. We use a detailed matched employee‐employer administrative dataset that follows individuals over time, allowing us to adopt a quasi‐experimental approach based on event studies around the intervention. We find that the earnings of female academics increased by around 0.62 percentage points compared to their male counterparts as the control group, whose earnings remained constant after the pay transparency intervention, reducing the gender pay gap by 4.37 per cent. Further evidence suggests that the main mechanism for the fall in the pay gap is driven by female employees negotiating higher wages, particularly among senior female academics.

"Afterlives" of the Danwei in 21st-century China: The Case of the University Sector

Abstract: This article addresses the issue of the "afterlives" of the danwei (work units) in 21st-century China by examining the case of the danwei system in the university sector (gaoxiao danweizhi). It finds that two essential features of traditional gaoxiao danweizhi—i.e. universities as state appendages and the high degree of "organized dependence" (Walder) of professors on the university/state—have survived today in a reconstituted form. In particular, the weakening of professors' economic and personal dependence on the university/state has been accompanied by the strengthening of their career dependence on the state due to the governmental regulation of research projects, a new form of academic political steering. Drawing primarily on the author's over 10 years of full-time work at two research universities in China, this article contributes to existing studies on danwei, higher education and intellectuals.

Comparative Analysis of Female Leadership Styles in Public and Private Sector Universities: A Study in Pakistan

This study aimed to compare the styles of leadership practices of female leaders in public and private Universities in Pakistan. In this study, both quantitative and qualitative data were collected using a mixed-method approach. An adapted and developed questionnaire was used for quantitative data collection, whereas qualitative data were collected through a semi-structured interview schedule. A sample of 200 female leaders was selected for quantitative data collection, while 10 females from the said sample were selected for qualitative data collection through a simple random method. Quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS, whereas qualitative data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Based on the statistical results, this study discovered statistically significant differences in female transformational and transactional leadership styles and significant differences in job performance based on the university sector. This study discovered statistically insignificant differences based on the different positions of female leaders regarding transformational and transactional leadership, and job performance. Moreover, qualitative data revealed that female leaders clearly understood both leadership styles and how to improve job performance by practicing them. The originality of this study concerns the identification of the differences between leadership styles (transformational and transactional) practiced by female leaders of public and private Universities in Pakistan and explains female leaders' perceptions of the role of leadership styles in their job performance.

Crisis or Opportunity? International Income Growth in Scottish Universities during Covid-19

How did Scottish universities fare in the pandemic? This paper looks at changes in income and student enrolments, comparing the pandemic years (2020–2022) to those preceding them. Despite concerns that Covid would have negative impacts across the university sector, the analysis shows that both income and student numbers increased substantially in Scotland. This article builds on a related analysis ( Armstrong 2023 ) and focuses on a selection of ten universities that encompass the diverse range of sizes, locations and student cohorts making up the Scottish university sector. It finds that growth in income, against expectation, accelerated during Covid, and this is largely attributable to expanded recruitment of international students, who pay significantly higher fees than those located within the UK. Scottish universities made a record amount of income from international fees in 2021–22 of £1.14 billion. The analysis of income growth is followed by exploration of changes in student numbers and cohort compositions, where international student numbers also accelerated in the pandemic. A discussion of the implications of these changes considers the growing divide among Scottish universities, and the wider implications that rapid growth and increasing dependence on one source of income has for universities, their staff and students and the cities and towns in which they are located.

Carbon neutral conferencing: A case study in poetics

The author was co-convener of the Australian Capital Territory’s first government-certified, carbon-neutral conference, Out of the Ordinary: On Poetry and the World, 5–7 December 2022. This paper centres upon a case study of that conference, intended to serve as a model for future such events. Bookending that case study are two discussions. The first addresses recent scholarship on the internationalisation of the university sector and the conflict it poses to concurrent policy drives towards environmentally sustainable operations. The literature on sustainable conferencing reveals the extent of that conflict, but also contains many practical measures for staging responsible events that involve genuine emissions reductions. Some of those measures feature within the poetry conference case study: vegetarian catering, eradication of printed materials, free registration for Indigenous delegates, compulsory travel offsetting, deliberate regionalisation. A final section considers problems with the very idea of carbon neutrality – as a concept based in “net” accounting practices that equate measures intended to affect the removal of emissions with no emissions – in the interest of driving further change in our conferencing practices.

The Influence of Knowledge Management on Increasing Innovation and Competitive Advantage in the Private University Sector in Kuwait

The main aim of current study is to examine the influence of knowledge management KM (Knowledge Creation, Knowledge acquisition, Knowledge sharing, Knowledge storage, Knowledge dissemination, Knowledge utilization, Knowledge retention) in increasing innovation capability IC and competitive advantage CA within private universities sector in the state of Kuwait. The study launched its aim through the aid of resource-based view theory which states that non-tangible assists of an organization help in supporting its journey to competitiveness and innovation. Through depending on quantitative methodology, a questionnaire was distributed on a sample of (303) respondents from private universities sector in the state of Kuwait. SPSS was used to deal with primary data depending on multiple regression and Pearson correlation. Results indicated the acceptance of the fact that KM has the ability to increase innovative abilities and competitive advantage within private universities sector in the state of Kuwait. Influence of KM on innovation capability appeared to be higher with a variance of 94.9% compared to competitive advantage which was also influenced by KM with a variance of 92.3%. Results also indicated that there was a correlation between variables of KM and both variables of competitive advantage and innovation capability. The highest relationship was between Knowledge sharing and Innovation Capability; whereas the highest relationship was between Knowledge storage and Competitive Advantage. Study recommended organizations should focus more on training and development in the field of knowledge storing and retaining so employees can have more awareness of how to deal with knowledge through their daily tasks.

Exploring the employment motivation, job satisfaction and dissatisfaction of university English instructors in public institutions: a Chinese case study analysis

This study considers the important areas of language teacher employment motivation, job satisfaction and dissatisfaction in state universities in China. This is an area in which there is a distinct lack of research studies. Through an exploratory case study analysis, and depth enlightening interviews, this paper considers the experiences of two outwardly successful doctorate status educators, examining their early career motives and subsequent employment satisfaction and dissatisfaction. It finds that these English instructors were driven by a diverse range of extrinsic motives to work in the Chinese public university sector. They were largely satisfied with their jobs, but they also reported dissatisfaction in certain areas. For example, they appreciated the teaching loads and respect afforded to university teachers, but harboured worries about their longer-term professional development. The study also reveals the different treatment and concerns experienced by home and expatriate university English teachers working in China. There are implications for a wide range of important pedagogic and professional areas. These range from teacher wellbeing and mental health to development and training, career management and leadership practice. On a more macro level still, there are also potential implications for institutional human resource governance.

Higher education policy and a future Labour government: distinguishing the probable from the possible

There is now the very real possibility of a change of UK government before the end of next year. This articles looks for clues as to what a Labour led government might mean for the higher education sector, at a time when substantial and radical change is desperately needed. It seems that Labour's approach to the university sector will be dominated by a focus on the economic role of higher education, combined with a fiscal conservatism that will further undermine more radical options. A longer-term transformative project remains a possibility, but its proponents must look beyond the lifetime of the next government. The realisation of any aspirational project for change will depend on the development of a broad and progressive alliance that is able to articulate, and organise around, a more hopeful and optimistic vision of the public university. There is potential for such a movement to emerge from the current industrial disputes in the sector, which have clearly exposed the limitations of the neoliberal university; but such a movement must also transcend any tendency to a narrow economism and link to a much broader political agenda