The demands on and expectations of Institutional Research (IR) departments at colleges and universities have continued to expand over the years, yet there have been no studies on cost effective ways to develop and maintain the knowledge and skills needed by professionals in the field. Using a survey and social network analysis, this study explored…

This article, based upon the closing plenary delivered to the recent conference of Professional Practice, Education and Learning, reflects upon the developments of the ProPEL network over the past seven years and its possibilities for future directions. To provide some context for these reflections, the article begins by outlining key challenges…

The application of social network analysis to policy networks continues to grow, including the application of social network analysis tools and concepts in order to explain policy outcomes. Gaps in this field of study persist in terms of both policy issues studied, as well as types of polities or networks analysed. This study extends previous…

This iterative study examined factors that influence student engagement in an online asynchronous discussion forum (DF), which is a standard feature of most learning management systems (LMSs) and thus of most online courses at the university level. DFs are a principle way to enable online participation and interaction on a student-to-student and…

This study's purpose was to explore ways of bridging conspicuous barriers to collaborative knowledge sharing among a specific group of IT Professionals (ITPs) supporting a heterogeneous school of arts and sciences at a large public research university. Forming the core of the study were a structural-cultural lens, a design-based research…

In contrast to traditional statistical approaches, which assume the existence of a latent common cause leading to the emergence and covariance of indicators, network modeling assumes that latent features emerge because of interactions between indicators. Clearly, such a way of treating the results of the Program for International Student…

Environmental educators exchange ideas in social networks, which may in turn impact their practices. This study uses social network analysis, surveys, correlation analysis and interviews to examine the relationship between network and practice change in three professional development programs. In the first program that used face-to-face…

Purpose: The growth of online social network sites and their conceptualization as affinity spaces makes them well suited for exploring how individuals share knowledge and practices around specific interests or affinities. The purpose of this study is to extend what is known about highly active/key actors in online affinity spaces, especially the…

Investigating the stories behind the makers of 3D models of crystals has proved unexpectedly unstraightforward. Drawing on actor-network theory (ANT), this article investigates the references behind a set of models of mineralogical crystals made of pasteboard held by National Museums Scotland (NMS), to uncover the history and tradition of such…

Social network analysis (SNA) examines the relationships that an individual speaker creates and maintains with others in order to explain and predict language behavior. Over the past 20 years, SNA has been used by a growing number of researchers to better understand the language learner and the language learning process, especially in the context…

Rapid advancements and emergent technologies add an additional layer of complexity to preparing computer science and information technology higher education students for entering the post pandemic job market. Knowing and predicting employers' technical skill needs is essential for shaping curriculum development to address the emergent skill gap.…

A major rationale for study abroad (SA) from the perspective of second language acquisition is the presumed opportunity available to sojourners for naturalistic second language (L2) "immersion". However, such opportunities are affected by variations in the linguistic, institutional and social affordances of SA, in different settings.…

Background/Context: Adding global competency to the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) suite heralds the world's first large-scale attempt at gauging education systems' development of students' global competency. Given the contested definitions and more than 150 extant…

The application of social network analysis (SNA) has recently grown prevalent in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education research. Research on classroom networks has led to greater understandings of student persistence in physics majors, changes in their career-related beliefs (e.g., physics interest), and their academic…

There has been a growing interest in how teaching might be informed by "learning design" (LD), with a promising method for investigating LD being offered by the emerging field of "learning analytics" (LA). In this study, we used a novel LA for LD methodology to investigate the implementation of LD in an online distance learning…