Cultural influence on global assessment of higher education service quality: The case of Central Queensland University, Australia

© 2014 by IGI Global. All rights reserved. This study compares students' cultural influence on global assessment of higher education service quality. In particular, this study surveyed the full-time students (that is at least 24 credit points of study in a semester) studying at the Central Queensland University (CQU), Australia. CQU has ten campuses and is one of the largest universities in Australia, with more than 14,000 students, in which 3,000 students are enrolled as full-time students and 11,000 as part-time students. An online survey was undertaken, and 227 responses from full-time students were returned for data analysis. Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were performed to determine valid and reliable dimensions of perceived service quality. Tests of differences such as ANOVA and t-test were conducted to examine the differences of perceived service quality in terms of four cultural dimensions; namely, power distance, individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity. Findings show that different cultures perceive service quality differently; especially administrative service quality and physical facilities service quality.

Market subjectivity and neoliberal governmentality in higher education

Using an interpretive case study in a business school in India, this research examines student behaviour and offers an understanding of a marketisation process in higher education. The study deploys Foucault's conceptualisation of governmentality and uncovers processes through which market subjectivity is fostered among students as they strive to become responsible, active, and entrepreneurial subjects. The subject position is attributed to several governmental discourses of peer pressure, abnormality, uncritical pedagogy, loan repayment, and elitism that prevail in the business school. The study further highlights the roles of English language and preference for western corporations which are unique to postcolonial India. Market subjectivity results in the prevalence of instrumental rationality, failure to develop a critical academic perspective, subordination of social concerns, and disenchantment and exclusion among some students.

Self-regulated learning strategies & academic achievement in online higher education learning environments: a systematic review

© 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. As enrolments in online courses continue to increase, there is a need to understand how students can best apply self-regulated learning strategies to achieve academic success within the online environment. A search of relevant databases was conducted in December 2014 for studies published from 2004 to Dec 2014 examining SRL strategies as correlates of academic achievement in online higher education settings. From 12 studies, the strategies of time management, metacognition, effort regulation, and critical thinking were positively correlated with academic outcomes, whereas rehearsal, elaboration, and organisation had the least empirical support. Peer learning had a moderate positive effect, however its confidence intervals crossed zero. Although the contributors to achievement in traditional face-to-face settings appear to generalise to on-line context, these effects appear weaker and suggest that (1) they may be less effective, and (2) that other, currently unexplored factors may be more important in on-line contexts.

Lifting the cloak of conceptual confusion: Exploring the meaning of the human right to higher education

The right to education, and specifically higher education, is clearly set out in international law. Higher education is, however, in a state of change as a result of pressures from the increased demand for higher education, globalisation and the impact of new technology (Barber, Donnelly and Rizvi 2013, 1–2). This article asserts that before significant changes to higher education are made, we should reflect on the content of the human rights obligations contained in the international documentation. It seeks to outline the content and scope of the right to higher education in an effort to assist this consideration.

Investigating the effects of personality traits on pair programming in a higher education setting through a family of experiments

Evidence from our systematic literature review revealed numerous inconsistencies in findings from the Pair Programming (PP) literature regarding the effects of personality on PP's effectiveness as a pedagogical tool. In particular: i) the effect of differing personality traits of pairs on the successful implementation of pair-programming (PP) within a higher education setting is still unclear, and ii) the personality instrument most often used had been Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), despite being an indicator criticized by personality psychologists as unreliable in measuring an individual's personality traits. These issues motivated the research described in this paper. We conducted a series of five formal experiments (one of which was a replicated experiment), between 2009 and 2010, at the University of Auckland, to investigate the effects of personality composition on PP's effectiveness. Each experiment looked at a particular personality trait of the Five-Factor personality framework. This framework comprises five broad traits (Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism), and our experiments focused on three of these - Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness. A total of 594 undergraduate students participated as subjects. Overall, our findings for all five experiments, including the replication, showed that Conscientiousness and Neuroticism did not present a statistically significant effect upon paired students' academic performance. However, Openness played a significant role in differentiating paired students' academic performance. Participants' survey results also indicated that PP not only caused an increase in satisfaction and confidence levels but also brought enjoyment to the tutorial classes and enhanced students' motivation.

Universal Design in Higher Education

While colleges and universities increasingly draw upon the concept of Universal Design to create an ideal learning environment, it can be challenging to apply the concept practically in the classroom. This project explores innovative ways to incorporate Universal Design into campus architecture, classroom technology and curriculum development. Further, this brief describes different approaches used by universities to garner faculty interest and offer effective training in Universal Design.

The Profile of a Manager in Higher Education Institution in Latin America: The Case of the EBAPE

The aim of this study is to analyze the profile of today’s manager, according to the classical management literature, working on internationalized higher education institute. This paper draws together knowledge about the manager’s profile in a corporate environment and how it can be appreciated in a higher education institute all of this taking into consideration the environment that nowadays exists in these institutions. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, with professors of the Fundacao Getulio Vargas, more specific on their Public and Business Administration School (EBAPE), which had active roles on its development, internationalization and during some point in time their management. The findings obtained where analyzed under the perspective brought by the theoretical reference framework, and, based on this approach is represented the manager whom could have a better perspective to administrate a higher education institute.

Defining student participation and empowerment in higher education

Customer participation has been studied for decades; however, it gained a postmodern perspective around the year 2000. Customers have become co-creators of personalized experiences, moving from the audience to the stage. In the educational context, students must take responsibility for their learning process and participate in the production of the service. This changing is providing opportunities and challenges for higher education institutions (HEIs) to redefine their relationship with stakeholders, especially with students. This study is based on the service dominant logic (SDL) perspective because students are assumed to take the role of co-creators of knowledge in the educational setting. The research uses adapted frameworks and concepts applied in organizational, knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) and also medical studies to advance the understanding of value co-creation in the HEI context. The current study addresses a lack of research in the higher education context focusing on defining students’ participation and students’ empowerment in higher education context. An empirical investigation was developed with traditional schools in Brazil. This investigation allowed the description of the constructs in the specific context. The description of student participation in HEIs context reflects the relevance of three dimensions – information sharing, personal interaction and responsible behavior. In the Brazilian context, responsible behavior is the weakest dimension in the construct, because the responsibilities are unbalanced between students and professors. The main reasons identified for this unbalanced relation were cultural issues and local regulation. Student empowerment was described as composed by four dimensions – meaningfulness, competence, impact and choice; however, one of them – choice – was identified as the weakest dimension, facing cultural and bureaucratic barriers for implementation in the Brazilian educational context. Moreover, interviewees spontaneously cited the idea of trust in the faculty as an important antecedent of student participation that must be considered when analyzing student participation and empowerment mechanisms. An additional contribution was the proposal of a theory-based framework for understanding the service dominant logic perspective in the HEI context, in which student participation and student empowerment were explored as mechanisms leading to positive student behavior toward institution.

The effects of accountability on higher education

This paper analyzes the effect of an accountability system in the Brazilian college market. For each discipline, colleges were assigned a grade that depended on the scores of their students on the ENC, an annual mandatory exam. Those grades were then disclosed to the public, giving applicants information about college quality. The system also established rewards and penalties based on the colleges’ grades. I find that the ENC had a substantial effect on different measures of college quality, such as faculty education and the proportion of full-time faculty. The detailed information from this unique dataset and the fact that the ENC started being required for different disciplines in different years allow me to control for time-specific effects, thus minimizing the bias caused by policy endogeneity. Indeed, I find strong evidence on the importance of controlling for time-specific effects: estimates of the impact of the ENC on college quality more than double when I do not take those effects into account. The ENC also affects positively the ratio between applicants and vacancies, and it decreases the faculty and the entering class sizes. The results suggest that its introduction fostered competition and favored colleges entering the market.

The Digital Divide in the University: The Appropriation of ICT in Higher Education Students from Bogota, Colombia

The growth and integration of ICTs in the global economy have created conditions that profoundly affect our society, dividing communities between those who effectively appropriate these resources and those who do not, what is called the digital divide. This exploratory study seeks to propose and validate ways of assessing this phenomenon in higher education, from the construction of a model and a comprehensive methodology that value contextual conditions, in addition to measuring access factors and motivation for use, that have been employed in previous research. To obtain indications about the behavior of this phenomenon, we developed research with students from three universities in Bogota, administering 566 surveys in four phases that would test the variables proposed in the model. The results show that the variables of the model link causally, with the strongest relations between education, attitude towards ICTs and ICT application. Although students have good access to ICTs and high levels of education, no strong relationship was found in regards to perceived impact on production. This may be explained by a superficial appropriation of ICT, due to a context that is alien to its conditions of origin (industrialism, innovation), poor quality of education and economies not centered around R&D.

Teachers Formation in Higher Education: Some Aspects under the Light of Education-Work Relations

This text is mainly aimed to address essential aspects of teacher formation in the light of education-work relations in the higher education, from our systematic experience in higher education teaching, particularly teaching and research in the field of Didactics discipline. This formulation is justified considering our concern in seeking to situate this discussion in the context of bringing together knowledge areas and the field of teaching knowledge. Still, our choice to develop such an approach in the light of work-education relationship is due to the belief about the possibilities of seeking to overcome the requirements imposed by capitalism to our educational system, within the possible contradictions of these relationships. In this context the teachers’ formation in higher education gains social and strategic importance, taking on the task of forming individuals of “action-reflection-action” in a society established historically based on the social relations which settle in the light of capital’s multiple determinations. It appears that, in this sense, the major confrontations have been given within the discussions about what to prioritize or combine in the list of criteria and content for teacher’s formation. In Didactic, we seek to emphasize discussions that we consider with a philosophical background, referring to the orientation of teaching practice in knowledge of contemporary ideological struggle; socio-historical, referring to the possibility of formation of disciplines, among them Didactic, and curriculums and references to support its guidance in the process of teacher’s formation. This context of discussion is based on the concrete teaching practice with a view to transformation and to search for new syntheses in terms of knowledge and in terms of historical reality. Then therefore, our methodological approach grounded in the dimensions of the same unit: historical materialism as posture, method and as praxis.

Typology of companies networks for competitive assessment: an application in higher education institutions

Taking into account the changes in the market scenario by virtue of globalization, Institutes of Higher Education (IES) as well as other organizations seek their competitive stability. For that reason, it is up to organizations to adopt innovative models of management for their operations aimed at improving results. Company networks consist of a model that is perfect for uniting efforts through cooperation among partners in a given business, which can involve ties of different natures. This paper shows the development and the application of an auxiliary technique to analyze the intensity, nature and importance of internal and external relations in the formation of results for a company network. For such, a multiple case study was conducted at two IES in the State of São Paulo and their networks of partners and employees in order to observe their specificities and organizational strategies. The study demonstrated the existence of specific performance criteria (pillars) for each IES and its network, resulting from its competitive reality. It reveals evidence that the education pillar is strengthened in both cases, and the research pillar is growing, although it is the weakest. The outreach pillar is the most robust in the public IES and the financial sustainability pillar is relevant for the private IES, and it was only detected in this IES.