Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impacts of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems on user performance (UP) in higher education institutions with a view to better understanding the ERP phenomenon in these institutions, and to determine whether or not these systems work well in such a complex environment.…

Successful colleges require effective leadership and governance. Effective governing boards are comprised of trustees who are committed to excellence in performing their duties. How do governing boards assure they are effective? One way is through ongoing board and trustee education and development, to provide the skills necessary to govern well.…

As the definition of organization has evolved, so have the approaches used to evaluate organizational performance. During the past 60 years, organizational theorists and management scholars have developed a comprehensive line of thinking with respect to organizational assessment that serves to inform and be informed by the evaluation discipline.…

This article discusses paradoxes in the emergent global field of higher education as reflected in an alternative model of the university--the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV) and the related higher education policy, Mision Sucre. With its credo in the applied social sciences, its commitment to popular pedagogy and its dependence on…

Recent research into university ranking methodologies uncovered several methodological problems among the systems currently in vogue. One of these is the discrepancy between the nominal and attained weights. The problem is the summation of unstandardized indicators for the total scores used in ranking. It is demonstrated that weight discrepancy…

When China liberalised its economy and opened up to the (Western) world, it actively promoted the English language at schools and universities on a massive scale. This learn-English movement, riding on the back of English as the dominant international language, has powered English into China's education reforms. We outline the movement and discuss…

Building on a mixed method research approach, this article reports on an analysis of the difference between public and private higher education institutions (HEIs) in Egypt in terms of teaching methods, quality assessment approaches and alumni engagement. An analysis of the survey data compared the experiences of 1,713 graduates of both private…

During recent years, we have seen an increase in the complexity of school leadership as knowledge work. The new forms of knowledge available to school leadership, such as performance data and survey-based data, raise the expectation that leaders make relevant use of these knowledge resources. Theory and policy claim that new knowledge is of…

Increasingly, academics have to demonstrate that their research has academic impact. Universities normally use journal rankings and journal impact factors to assess the research impact of individual academics. More recently, citation counts for individual articles and the h-index have also been used to measure the academic impact of academics.…

By the 2015-16 award year, a college ranking system, known as the Postsecondary Institution Ratings System (PIRS), will likely be in place to evaluate institutions on a number of factors. While it has not yet been determined what metrics will be used for evaluation, possibilities include: number of students receiving the Federal Pell Grant,…

Purpose: In Saudi Arabia, technical education is managed by Technical and Vocational Training Corporation. However, there is no independent accrediting body to accredit the technical institutes and assure its quality, which causes the lack of unified quality assurance standards and manageable quality improvement processes. The purpose of this…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to discuss Portuguese academics' views on quality assessment and the elements that are important for a better understanding of what ascribes meaning to "quality cultures" in Portuguese higher education. Design/methodology/approach: The discussion was based on the results of a survey run in 2010…

This study seeks to identify and assess factors that contribute to effective independent school governance at the board of trustees level. A review of extant literature reveals two major challenges: (a) definitions and standards of board effectiveness are inconsistent, and (b) there is very little empirical evidence to support existing definitions…

The Abu Dhabi Education Council (ADEC) has initiated educational change and school improvements. As part of the school reform agenda, ADEC has introduced school self-evaluation-Irtiqaa (SSE-Irtiqaa). This research probes the effectiveness of school administrators (SAs), including principals, vice principals, academic principals, and heads of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to test the hypothesis that there are correlations between campus sustainability initiatives and environmental performance, as measured by resource consumption and waste generation performance metrics. Institutions of higher education would like to imply that their campus sustainability initiatives are good…