In this article, the author discusses the issues on the impression of today's students towards liberal education. Results found that, students did not have a working definition of a liberal education and did not spontaneously value the outcomes of such an education. Consequently, students tend to focus on specific course-oriented outcomes; and…

With the intention of defining an initial research agenda for discipline-specific factors in the usability of e-learning websites, this article focuses on the example of foreign language learning. First, general notions and concepts of usability are analyzed, and the term "pedagogical usability" is proposed as a means of focusing on the close…

The aim of this paper is to propose information literacy as a soft applied discipline, of key importance in the information society. This is contrasted with the characterization of information literacy as a personal attribute in the U.S. and Australian Information Literacy standards. Vannevar Bush's vision of the technologically connected and…

This paper discusses university finances in European countries which derive from the Humboldtian tradition. Such universities are mainly state funded, are independent academically but dependent financially, and have long histories of keeping the power of the state at bay. The most far-reaching, and arguably intended, consequence of government…

The issue of addressing innovation and change in engineering students' assessment is the target of this paper. The contents are an overview of the issues related to the evolution of the engineering learning requirements, a review of the traditional student evaluation methods in practice, a description of a current experiment in engineering student…

Drawing analogies with the crisis in understandings of culture that led to the development of cultural studies, I suggest in this article that a similar crisis in the understanding of language may give an important impetus to the development of language studies. Arguing for the need to rethink the notion of language as commonly formulated in…

Many instructors appreciate the importance of developing the critical thinking skills of their students yet are unfamiliar with pedagogical approaches for teaching critical thinking. These instructors rely on instructional support from teaching and learning centers or online resources. It can be time consuming, however, for instructors to…

A serious problem exists in the academic world, namely doctoral education attrition rates that approach 50% in some disciplines. Yet, calls for action have generally been "ad hoc" rather than theory driven. Further, research has not been conceived and implemented with sufficient breadth to integrate factors influencing the outcomes across the…

Meditation is now one of the most enduring, widespread, and researched of all psychotherapeutic methods. However, to date the meeting of the meditative disciplines and Western psychology has been marred by significant misunderstandings and by an assimilative integration in which much of the richness and uniqueness of meditation and its…

Recent decades have witnessed an increase in thanatology education in colleges and universities. However, the infusion into thanatology curricula of religious faiths as they affect behaviors, experiences and emotions of dying individuals and survivors is still in its infancy. In this article I describe an effective approach I have used to…

What happens when educational ideas cross national and cultural borders? How do teachers respond to ideas originating in a different school system and a different national culture? This article reports on an empirical study investigating the transfer of ideas from Design & Technology as a subject in England and Wales into Norwegian schools. A…

This paper examines two very different approaches to dance training, ballet technique and the somatic discipline of Topf technique ("TT"). It explores and evaluates the application of TT to ballet training. Initially, what is meant by the term "mind/body connection" is discussed, and then the paper examines, in a theoretical and a practical sense,…

A 20th-century discipline in American universities, communication has struggled with questions of academic identity: generically, as to whether it is a "humanities" or a "social science", a "practice" or a "technology", and theoretically, as to what sorts of axioms, theorems, research methods or logics, and problems should form its core. This…

In 2003 the Doctoral Faculty Commission, created by Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB, 2003) International to address the problem of doctoral faculty shortages in business, reported that alternative supply of business faculty with doctoral degrees can be obtained by attracting and transitioning doctoral-trained…

With the rapid expansion of scientific information at the end of the 19th century, disciplines sought ways to keep their members abreast of the relevant research. Those pressures were felt in the science of psychology in the United States, where psychologists developed a bibliographic aid, The Psychological Index, in 1895 only a little more than a…