Learning theories and interdisciplinary epistemologies

Interdisciplinary teaching and learning in higher education incorporates multiple ways of knowing. As interdisciplinary pedagogies become increasingly important in a global knowledge economy, which learning theories best inform thinking and practice in these endeavours? This paper explores a range of theories and ideas about learning, including constructivism, situated learning, experiential learning and phenomenography, and their relevance to interdisciplinarity in higher education.

Learning approaches and student perceptions of teaching quality

This research investigated the links between students' personal characteristics, their approaches to learning and their perceptions of teaching quality in a first-year accounting unit. Significant learning differences were found between Australian and Chinese students, and strong inter-relationships between contextual factors, such as teaching quality, and learning approaches were identified.

Continuous product innovation : learning behaviours and knowledge management

The research reported in this paper considers Product Innovation from a broader perspective than that of the isolated NPD (New Product Development) project commonly discussed in the literature. In this perspective, Product Innovation is a continuous and cross-functional process involving the sharing and transfer of knowledge within the many steps of the innovation process, and the integration of a growing number of different competencies inside and outside the organisational boundaries. This paper examines two in-depth case studies that were carried out to establish if and how learning occurred within companies developing new products. Based on a model developed as part of a joint Euro-Australian research project, the way in which the selected companies share and transfer knowledge and learning experiences during their product innovation processes have been examined and analysed. This model uses a number of interrelated variables including performance, behaviours and levers to stimulate improvement, contingencies, and learning/innovation capabilities to describe the learning and knowledge transfer in product innovation processes within the case studies. This paper discusses some of the skills the research has identified that managers need to enable their companies to gain a competitive advantage through improved product innovation. The ongoing research has developed, tested and disseminated a computer-based methodology to assess organisational knowledge capture and transfer in the new product development process. The research is part of the Euro-Australian co-operation project known as CIMA (Continuous Improvement and Product Innovation Management).

Reflecting on contemporary accounting : teaching and learning social and critical perspectives

This paper provides a case description and analysis of an effort to enact accounting education change. The study reports on an attempt to renew the social and ethical worth of accounting education and practice in the post-Enron context of increased interest in how accounting may contribute to social responsibility and sustainability. The paper considers the organisation, aims, and content of a newly-developed unit on social and critical perspectives on accounting, and key elements of the pedagogy utilised. These include team teaching, the employment of research literature rather than a prescribed textbook, an expanded conception of accounting and accounting “knowledge”, the adoption of educational goals that encompass preparing students for economic and social life and for democratic participation, and a view that sees ethics, the environment, and society as central to accounting. It is concluded that accounting educational change must encompass the content and practice of classroom activity, but it also requires change to the self-consciousness of all actors involved. Explicit inclusion of the social, critical, environmental and ethical dimensions of accounting in our teaching and learning programs provides an avenue for academics to individually and collectively make a meaningful contribution.

Student perception of learning approach and teamwork benefits in accounting : a qualitative study

Accounting academics have heeded the call to incorporate team learning activities into the curricula, yet little is known of student perception of teamwork and whether they view it as beneficial to them. This study addresses the gap by utilising qualitative techniques to examine student perception of the benefits of teamwork and what aspects of the teamwork will contribute to their future professional work. Results indicate that students perceive teamwork enables the use of deep learning and, further, that teamwork at the undergraduate level contributes to their future abilities in the profession. The paper ends by presenting implications for accounting educators.

Impact of learning environment and learning context on student satisfaction : a comparative study of postgraduate students from Asia

The growth of the international education market with increasing export income has created a highly competitive environment among education providers worldwide. WTO reports that this market is now worth around $27 billion a year (Alderman, 2001) while IDP Australia has estimated an increase in the number of students seeking higher education overseas at 7.2 million by 2025. This alludes to the attractiveness of the international education market in the form of both pecuniary and non pecuniary benefits to provider nations and the higher educational institutions and hence the need for strategies to maintain a globally competitive position. This paper looks at the impact of the learning environment and the learning context on student satisfaction among international postgraduate students from Asia studying in Australian universities. The growing competition requires provider institutions to be highly responsive to the needs and aspirations of the diverse student community and to deliver services to create satisfaction and loyalty, which would be critical in sustaining a competitive position. The study, based on the expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm, and a model of post choice satisfaction in the educational setting, uses logistic regression, MANOVA, ANOVA and chi square testing, investigates factors relevant to student learning environment and the learning context to assess satisfaction levels of these students. The sample size used in the study is 371 and is drawn from a mail survey of five leading universities in Australia.

A Bayesian framework for learning shared and individual subspaces from multiple data sources

This paper presents a novel Bayesian formulation to exploit shared structures across multiple data sources, constructing foundations for effective mining and retrieval across disparate domains. We jointly analyze diverse data sources using a unifying piece of metadata (textual tags). We propose a method based on Bayesian Probabilistic Matrix Factorization (BPMF) which is able to explicitly model the partial knowledge common to the datasets using shared subspaces and the knowledge specific to each dataset using individual subspaces. For the proposed model, we derive an efficient algorithm for learning the joint factorization based on Gibbs sampling. The effectiveness of the model is demonstrated by social media retrieval tasks across single and multiple media. The proposed solution is applicable to a wider context, providing a formal framework suitable for exploiting individual as well as mutual knowledge present across heterogeneous data sources of many kinds.