For today's registrar, disentangling the institutional curriculum can be a daunting task. The complex and interconnected learning that higher education institutions now strive for is highly desirable among millennial students, but even the most articulate curricula sometimes fail to represent it clearly. Whether navigating the registration system,…

The "bounce" (coined by students at Susan Leigh's last campus) refers to the amount of time students spent chasing signatures and removing often-unnecessary registration "holds" in order to attend their classes. Leigh explains that all this chaos from complex, separately housed transactional business processes has led to the…

Decentralization of teacher recruitment and selection in Kenya was as a result of World Bank/IMF policies, which support projects that guarantee direct net economic returns by productivity and indirect returns on externalities. The approach has been used as a way of improving service delivery. This strategy that has been successful elsewhere may…

This commentary describes the limitations of 40-minute class period times. The forty-minute system makes hash of the lives of teachers, especially in small schools, and about 80 percent of high schools have fewer than two hundred pupils. These small schools crowd their forty-minute periods with as many diverse and unrelated activities as possible,…

When it comes to project management, the IT department is typically its own worst enemy. When project requests are pushed through the budgeting process by different departments, it's up to IT to make them all work. The staff is required to be "heroic" to get the project load done. People get to work over weekends and postpone their vacations. The…

A return to normal after a crisis is a good thing. Who doesn't want back what once seemed lost? The problem is it usually isn't a simple task figuring out how to patch together a scaled-back training program. When the recession hit in fall 2008, trainers were asked to scale down programming and make do with fewer resources. With a recovery in full…

An experienced developer might have a bagful of techniques to reach for when his/her code is not working. For both new and experienced coders, if they have stared at broken code for hours without any idea what's wrong, it can be easy to reach for emotional responses first. The code might be messed up, but one's constructive options for dealing…

This paper considers teacher resilience from the viewpoint of a discipline concerned with the interactions between work design, management style and employee health and well-being: occupational health psychology. It will be suggested that there are strong parallels between interventions designed to promote resilience and those designed to reduce…

For The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc., last year proved the perfect backdrop for meeting learning and development goals as the company completed the largest acquisition in its history. While training and development have always been a priority for PNC, in 2010 the company climbed one step higher. The acquisition of National City…

The recession of 2008-2009 and the continuing decline in local, state, and federal funds available to support higher education have resulted in serious budget cuts and belt-tightening. Given that faculty constitute an institution's most costly resource, it was not surprising, though it is nonetheless disheartening, to learn of the University of…

There is no doubt that the American economy is in the midst of a major restructuring. While the consequences are not yet fully apparent, two powerful implications for higher education have become clear. First, because solutions to the nation's problems will require a highly educated work force, the demands on colleges can only increase. Second,…

Changes in education systems across Europe are a response to perceived needs to improve academic performance. The recent workforce remodelling agenda in England (2003-2005) reflected a growing concern that centralisation and the associated deskilling of teachers had gone too far. The resultant restructuring of the work of teachers, giving roles…

Over the past two decades, scholars and practitioners in a variety of industries have considered work redesign among a constellation of strategies to promote employee recruitment and retention, development, motivation, and performance. Although educational policymakers in the middle to late 1990s shifted their attention to standards, systemic…