This article explores the literature and practice of how the Cooperative Extension Service does its work and asks if traditional outreach and engagement models have room for innovative delivery mechanisms that may identify emerging trends and help meet community needs. It considers three innovative approaches to the educational mission:…

Budgetary constraints on the public purse have led Australian Federal and State governments to focus increasingly on the efficiency of public institutions, including Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutes. In this study, we define efficiency as the relationship between financial and administrative inputs and educational outputs. We…

The scope of institutional research (IR) undertaken in Australasian universities is progressively expanding. A traditional focus on student life cycle elements such as enrolment, retention and satisfaction has been complemented for some years now by other areas of focus including research performance and community engagement. More recently,…

In recent years there has been growth in online distance learning courses. This has been prompted by; new technology such as the Internet, mobile learning, video and audio conferencing: the explosion in student numbers in Higher Education, and the need for outreach to a world wide market. Web-based distance learning is seen as a solution to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss how activity-based costing (ABC) technique can be applied in the context of higher education institutions. It also discusses the obstacles and challenges to the successful implementation of activity-based management (ABM) in the higher education environment. Design/methodology/approach: This paper…

The question of the manner in which universities have organised themselves to embed the "quality" agenda in Scotland is addressed in this paper by considering whether the seemingly different structures generated are in fact sophisticated and efficient forms of resource allocation, or organic and emergent structures with only local…

In this article, the authors offer the University of Brighton's Community-University Partnership Programme (CUPP) Helpdesk as a model of an "enabling platform" for university-community engagement. Despite the growth of practical and scholarly activity in this area, there is a relative lack of research focused on the processes by which…

One of a series of research reports examining objective principles successfully used in other fields which can lend integrity and legitimacy to evaluation, this report presents an overview of operations research (OR) as a potential source of evaluation methodology. The nature of the methods common to this discipline are summarized and the…

Describes Fault Tree Analysis, a tool for systems analysis which attempts to identify possible modes of failure in systems to increase the probability of success. The article defines the technique and presents the steps of FTA construction, focusing on its application to education. (RAO)

An intergovernment program implementation framework is shown to be strongly affected by the way federal expectations and administrative actions interact with the state and local education agency programs. They can influence the components of categories of implementation factors, process variables, and the agency role orientations. (CM)

An important and unresolved issue central to the study of government performance is how the actions of managers and the nature of organizations affect the cost of public services. This paper presents an empirical analysis of fire departments that estimates the influence of managerial choices on per capita spending within a simultaneous public…

Research was conducted to develop and gather evidence of validity for a normative process model to be used by community adult education councils in establishing priority among community-level needs. The study design was based on a five-stage problem solving, systems model involving exploration, model building, design and development, validation,…

Research in Australia on evaluating the application of action research as an action learning tool and its impact on the learning of students, educators, industry, and training providers, explored how that learning, in turn, has impacts on research, learners, educators, and the community. In the field of social and community services, in…