As the higher education landscape has shifted and calls for change and improvements have grown louder, researchers have turned to empirical investigations of what makes change possible in higher education. Recent studies on the impact of informal interactions for promoting change have given impetus to social network analysis as an approach to…

Innovation in higher education teaching is essential to respond to global challenges and actively improve teaching (e.g. through new technologies), necessitating the implementation of educational reform programmes that fund educational innovations. Although currently deployed strategies frequently promote networks between innovators to diffuse…

This dissertation brings together two research strands that study: (a) the ways in which physics and STEM students contribute to growing capacity for institutional change within collaborative teams and (b) the support structures of graduate programs through an innovative methodology grounded in network science. The first research strand is…

The current bibliometric study employed citation analysis and keyword analysis to perform a review of language assessment and testing. Based on citation counts and keywords, this study identified the recent trends/changes and the most influential regions, institutions, scholars, and publications in the field. In addition, the intellectual…

The three components that form the basis of the educational process are the teacher, the learner, and the environment. These three components are affected by the developing and changing technology as a result of globalization considerably. Teaching and learning techniques should be updated and connected with these developments; new tools are…

One of the goals of China's 'Double First-class' initiative is to boost the top-notch disciplines in those next-to-top universities and allow their differentiated paths towards development. This study investigates Chinese universities' policy interpretations and strategic responses to this national initiative through a social network analysis of…

Purpose: This study addresses a gap in the knowledge on how longitudinal engagement in a school improvement initiative influences change in middle leaders' (MLs') interactions and assesses how school-university partnerships around school improvement can support teachers with formal leadership roles (i.e. MLs') leadership development.…

(IOs) are influential policy actors in higher education. Yet, little is known regarding the role of philanthropic foundations in sponsoring IOs for policy promotion. By relying on longitudinal analysis of grants, semi-structured interviews, and social network analysis, this study examined the most central IOs within foundation-sponsored networks,…

Background: Change leaders (faculty, administrators, and/or external stakeholders) need to develop "relational expertise", recognizing the perspectives of others, to enable emergent, systemic change. We describe how change leaders of a grant-funded instructional change initiative developed relational expertise by analyzing faculty…

Stakeholders are increasingly calling for improving instruction in STEM by building environments that enable faculty to sustainably change their teaching practices. This study reports one institutional change effort that effectively facilitated faculty's adoption of evidence-based instructional practices (EBIP), which is to organize faculty into…

The purpose of this study is to create a model of tertiary vocational education in Kenya. Despite considerable progress in Kenya over the last 20 years, current education models, low attendance, and low academic proficiency levels preclude many vulnerable learners from becoming employable. Utilizing semi structured interviews of eight Kenyan…

Robert Baden-Powell's role in initiating the Scout movement is well covered in historiography. This article addresses a little-researched question concerning his associations with contemporary educationalists as a means of promoting social reform through education. In combining social network analysis with the study of hitherto underutilised…

With the development of information and communication technology, virtual mobility, as an approach to internationalising education, allows students to receive cross-border education without going abroad through online educational interactions. Additionally, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerates the development of virtual mobility, and…

Trustees span the boundaries between universities and their environments, and therefore may connect universities to other organizations. We use social networks and latent profile analyses to chart changes in the affiliations that trustees of AAU member universities maintained with other organizations from 1975 through 2015. Results identify a…

This article reviews literature on the potential for understanding higher education change processes through social network analysis (SNA). In this article, the main tenets of SNA are reviewed and, in conjunction with organizational theory, are applied to higher education change to develop a set of hypotheses that can be tested in future research.