As individuals face the challenge of rapidly changing and increasingly diversified study and work environments, online higher education (OHE) has become a mainstream solution for pre-service teachers and working professionals. Both universities and students have had to navigate connected, collaborative and globally networked learning scenarios.…

Student engagement is consistently identified as a key predictor of learner outcomes within the online learning environment. However, there is limited guidance about using proactive strategies to improve engagement for low and non-engaged students: for example by specifically employing course learning analytics (CLA) and nudging strategies in…

In this article, we propose a new model of student workload. We conducted an extensive literature review of student workload, its impact on students' lives, factors influencing student workload, objective and subjective measurements. The previous conceptualizations of student workload conflate student work and course workload, two related but…

This part-reflective, part-conceptual article focuses on the issue of supervision models and the need to move away from the dominance of the traditional master-apprentice model which continues to persist in many social sciences and humanities contexts. Drawing on communities of practice theory, I critically reflect on my own PhD supervision…

During the last 20 years, we have witnessed a growing interest in research in teaching, learning and educational development in higher education (HE). The result is that "Higher Education Didactics" has established itself as a research field in its own right. This article explores Higher Education Didactics as a framework for academics'…

For several decades, Western universities have been subject to wide-ranging structural, financial and ideological changes. These changes have problematised afresh the meaning of academic identity as evidenced by the emergence of a substantial, international, anglophone research literature. This article examines how the idea of academic identity…

In online education, learning design has a significant role in mediating student experience. Centralised approaches to learning design provide students with a coherent teaching approach across online units but little is known about their impact on the student. Understanding the influence of these overarching learning design features may be a…

This paper addresses the wicked problem of measuring the productivity of learning and teaching in higher education. We show how fundamental validity issues and difficulties identified in educational productivity research point to the need for a qualitatively different framework when considering the entire question. We describe the work that needs…

This article sets out to introduce a Personalised Autonomous (PA) model as a holistic and sustainable model to address the issue of international students' English Language Proficiency (ELP) in Australian higher education. This model was embedded in a credit-bearing course entitled Personalised English Language Enhancement (PELE). Both…

Lurking on the fringes of university culture are academic identities that do not fit into the usual disciplinary communities. Aiming to explore the experience of "being academic" when not linked directly to a discipline, this paper examines the stories of a diverse group of SoTL scholars who work in a centralised multi-campus academic…

Higher education institutions increasingly recognise the need to develop both disciplinary knowledge and soft skills to foster the employability of their graduates. For students in International Studies programmes, the workplace opportunities to develop soft skills relevant to their intended professions are scarce, costly and unavailable to many.…

In this article, the author comments on two highly cited articles and how they link to wider trends in higher education research. The two papers in question, Angela Brew's article from 2003, "Teaching and research: New relationships and their implications for inquiry-based teaching and learning in higher education" and Gerlese Akerlind's…

Effective teaching and learning in higher education is an important focal point of literature around the globe. Various models are presented as desirable and fostering optimal conditions for teaching and learning. However, each model must be examined within the context of its institutional culture, mission and strategic plan to ascertain if it…

The critical features of a strategy to promote improved teaching and learning are explored in this article from a socio-cultural perspective in a research-intensive institution. The paper presents theoretical underpinnings and implications as well as an empirical case study of such a strategy and its seemingly successful results. The strategy…

A working group was established at AUT University in 2005 with a brief to identify initiatives that might be taken to promote and support staff engagement in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). The working group recognized that a "stock-taking" exercise would need to be undertaken before appropriate initiatives could be…