In the 1970s and '80s, manufacturing firms began purchasing centralized administrative software--"Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems"--to support their infrastructure needs. In the 1990s, higher education adopted the term ERP to define the back-office systems used by institutions to meet their most pressing business needs--typically those…

According to new research, aspiring professors' negative view of faculty life at top research institutions is common: the large study of the University of California's graduate students revealed that less than half perceive major research institutions to be family-friendly workplaces for tenure-track professors. About 8,400 Ph.D. students from…

Accreditation under the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) has contributed to the professional decline of social work. The lack of scholarship of the Board of Directors of CSWE compromises its decision making. The quality of the professional literature suffers from the weak scholarship of editors and referees. The caliber of deans and…

The annual "America's Best Colleges" issue of "U.S. News & World Report" has long been referred to as the magazine's swimsuit issue. While the comparison is made in jest, in terms of newsstand sales the association with the popular "Sports Illustrated" cover is not far off. Last year the "U.S. News" college issue was among 17 perennial…

Administrators at post-secondary institutions have found that national or regional accreditation is necessary to remain competitive in the higher education market with evidence of assessment considered a positive measure for accreditation. This quantitative study examined the correlation between the ranked levels of knowledge management within…

This article reports on surveys conducted in 2002, 2006, and 2008 by members of the Louisiana Academic Library Information Network Consortium (LALINC) for the purpose of chronicling both the status of information literacy programs in Louisiana and the role of general education directors in program formation. Results from each survey are given,…

This study aimed at evaluating the institutional performance in secondary school in the Eastern Region. The study samples were comprised of 90 school principals during the academic year 2008/2009. The study concluded that the efficiency of the institutional performance is weak. Also concluded that there are no significant differences in the…

The need for a flexible and versatile workforce that is constantly learning and upgrading its skills has led to a continual demand for courses in which employees are re-trained and updated on a lifelong basis. Students and workers now have to be prepared for a labour market in which they can be expected to change jobs many times, and they need to…

It is obvious to all that the National Undergraduate Teaching and Learning Evaluation plan for higher education institutions launched in 2003 has promoted undergraduate teaching at universities and colleges. At the same time, however, the authors have also witnessed problems with the evaluation work itself, for example, unified evaluation…

This paper reviews the achievements of the first cycle of undergraduate teaching evaluation at institutions of higher education in China. Existing problems are identified, and suggestions are made for corresponding reforms for improving the standard and quality of China's undergraduate teaching evaluation.

This article focuses on ethical issues faced in evaluation practice from the viewpoint of third generation of activity theory, which gives a constructive perspective on how contradictions can be a driving force behind interorganizational learning and development in multiactor networks. The problem field is firstly addressed through an illustration…

Drawing upon publicly accessible information on the websites of ten Canadian research universities, this paper aims to shed some light on the assumed variation of institutional policies regarding the PhD dissertation defense in Canada. It discusses "How are the institutional policies on the doctoral dissertation defense different across…

Higher education in the US has long prized mission diversity as illustrated in the range of its colleges and universities including community colleges, baccalaureate (or liberal arts) colleges, doctoral-granting universities, and special-focus institutions, as well as its public, private non-profit, and private for-profit forms of control. This…

The construction of transnational and national systems for comparing qualities of universities are presented and discussed. In focus are two important university ranking lists--those produced by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University and by the "Times Higher Education Supplement". A Swedish example concerning the making of a resource…

Lots of papers are being published about e-learning in engineering education. In these papers, positive experiences and aspects seem to overshadow negative ones. However, there are still some problematic sides worth studying. In order to improve its quality these should receive broad attention too. We present an explicit two-sided evaluation of…