The curriculum includes educational activities that determine the struggle for survival and sustainability of a university's departments. Approaches that seek more flexible solutions and have a post-positivist understanding are needed to manage this system. One of these approaches is action research, first used by Kurt Lewin (1946) to solve social…

Since the emergence and development of digital technologies, the internet has quickly emerged as one of the most effective platforms for providing teachers and learners with access to resources for learning and sharing material. Universities in developing countries have limited access to digital technologies. At the few universities with access to…

While the fourth industrial revolution continues to change manufacturing enterprises all over the world, not all enabling key technologies are taught sufficiently at universities. For this purpose, a new lecture at the Montanuniversität Leoben was designed, teaching students of miscellaneous engineering disciplines, the fundamentals of…

Introduced in 2013, the A.L.P.E.S. approach (AgiLe aPproaches in higher Education Studies) aims to apply agile practices to teaching. Agile approaches are project management practices for IT development. More pragmatic than traditional methods, they allow to be closer to the applicant and to involve him/her as much as possible. They offer a great…

Academics nowadays are increasingly expected to implement high-quality teaching, what is frequently referred to as 'excellent teaching'. Understandings of academics' conceptions of excellent teaching are, however, limited, despite extensive research on different aspects of quality teaching. To address this gap, there is a need to expand the…

Academic librarians cannot escape the implications of the knowledge economy and the pervasion of technology which effects everything that we do. Similarly, we must be prepared to teach our students how to cope in this knowledge society and how to develop the necessary information and digital literacy skills to be productive members of society in a…

The article discusses the challenges and the potential approaches of competence-based programmes for higher education institutions, starting at their inception in the Bologna process. It focuses particularly on curriculum transformation and implementation of action-orientated learning concepts. Consequently, the article takes stock of recent…

Assuring the quality of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment is an increasingly significant issue in higher education. This article explores the potential benefit of 'consensus planning', an ongoing curriculum development, maintenance and monitoring strategy, to achieve consistency of academic standards for student learning and assessment across…

Clinical Legal Education (CLE) has recently been accepted as the pedagogic model in most Indonesian universities since the Asia Foundation Collaboration authorized eight universities to pursue this program. The objective of this study was to identify curriculum and instructional challenges in clinical legal education of Indonesian law schools, as…

Pathophysiology is a scientific discipline that studies the onset and progression of pathological conditions and diseases, and pathophysiology is one of the core courses in most preclinical medical curricula. In China, most medical schools house a Department of Pathophysiology, in contrast to medical schools in many developed countries. The staff…

Student evaluations of quantitative methods courses in political science often reveal they are characterised by aversion, alienation and anxiety. As a solution to this problem, this paper describes a pedagogic research project with the aim of embedding quantitative methods by stealth into the first-year undergraduate curriculum. This paper…

The quest continues to standardise quality assurance systems throughout the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) under the auspices of the Bologna Process and led by the European Network for Quality Assurance (ENQA). Mirroring its member organisation in England, the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), ENQA identifies, as one of its core aims, the…

Threshold concepts were used to underpin a major curriculum reform endeavour in occupational therapy. After rigorous interrogation of troublesome knowledge and ensuring that the emergent concepts conformed to the five characteristics of previously proposed threshold concepts, we identified five threshold concepts. Two years into the rollout of the…

Under the auspices of a DAAD funded educational project, a subproject devoted to different aspects of teaching the Java programming language started several years ago. The initial intention of the subproject was to attract members of the subproject to prepare some teaching materials for teaching essentials of the Java programming language. During…

C++ is the most commonly used language in introductory and intermediate programming courses in Bulgarian universities. In recent years this language has developed greatly. Its abstractions are more flexible and affordable than ever before. Such great number of changes are related to the launch of the new standard (known as C++11) that we have…