Collaborative Work in Higher Education: Tools and Strategies to Implement the E-Assessment

Objective: The aim of this research is to evaluate the implementation of the flipped classroom and collaborative work in university marketing students, in terms of academic performance, the development of cross-curricular competencies, student satisfaction and motivation, and the effective use of information and communication technologies in the learning process. Theoretical Framework: The main concepts and academic literature that underpin the research are presented, providing a solid foundation for understanding the context of the study. Method: The methodology adopted for this research is quantitative in nature, with a cross-sectional design, and exploratory and descriptive scope. Data collection was conducted using a questionnaire composed of five dimensions, in order to cover all aspects inherent to the mixed inclusive strategy that combines the flipped classroom and collaborative work in the university classroom. Results and Discussion: The results suggest that the flipped classroom and collaborative work have a generally positive impact on higher education, in line with much of the current scientific literature. However, it is also evident that careful consideration of implementation and context is necessary to maximize their effectiveness. Variations in outcomes, depending on factors such as discipline, course design, and the digital skills of the participants, are crucial aspects that must be considered. These findings underline the importance of a balanced and adaptive approach in the application of innovative methodologies in higher education. Originality/Value: This study stands out for its rigorous exploration of how the integration of the flipped classroom and collaborative work in higher education enhances soft skills and academic performance, contrasting with traditional methodologies. It underscores the relevance of adapting educational strategies to maximize the effectiveness of ICT in a contemporary and diversified learning context. Its value lies in providing empirical evidence that supports the implementation of these innovative methodologies, promoting more inclusive and effective learning environments.

In a time of rapid change and arising challenges, Millennials are the latest generation to enter high education institutions as junior faculty, administrators, researchers, and scholars. As with each generation they bring new values, perspectives, technological expertise, and expectations. Higher education is facing potentially overwhelming challenges in finances, student debt, relevance, non-traditional hiring, with some institutions facing closure. Academic leaders, often Baby Boomers, attempt to meet these challenges while still tied to traditions from a bygone time. The Changing Faces of Higher Education gives voice to Millennial academics and their perspective of higher education. This thought-provoking volume provides the insights and lessons from Millennials working in higher education across various subfields. The contributing authors speak from divergent institutions including small mid-western private colleges to larger East coast public institutions and many locations in-between. The contributing authors are not limited to faculty but covers a range of professionals working in higher education. While diverse, all the authors focus on the challenges in teaching, mentorship, and leadership, challenges related to diversity, and improving technology and research. The thirteen chapters in this book address ongoing challenges faced by Millennials working in higher education, offers advice and best practices, and addresses the ways that Millennials serve as a bridge between their “Boomer” colleagues and Gen Z who make up the majority of currently enrolled college students. Each chapter presents the experiences of the author(s) and the strategies utilized to navigate the increasingly fast changing landscape of higher education.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is the lead United Nations (UN) agency in the field of education. As its website proudly proclaims, UNESCO is: “the only UN body with a mandate in higher education.”1 However, UNESCO’s work in higher education has always operated at the margins of its education program (Daniels 2003, 22). Higher education has long been overshadowed by the organization’s focus on popular access to basic education, especially over the past decade, when UNESCO has made achieving “education for all” the central pillar of its educational activities (Mundy 1999). Nonetheless, a strong argument can be made about the need for a UN presence in higher education, particularly in the context of the globalization and internationalization of higher education. Massification of higher education, the growth of private and trans-border service provision, and new information and communications technologies are each transforming the global organization of higher education. In higher education, these processes of globalization have created new types of within-country inequality, and new regional and interstate forms of competition (Robertson and Keeling 2008; Marginson 2008). UNESCO’s mandate within the UN requires it to defend and promote the idea of equality of opportunity within an increasingly globalized higher education policy arena. Its own constitution also requires UNESCO to promote the sharing of knowledge and to defend cultural diversity. This chapter explores the effort within UNESCO to translate its mandate as the UN body in the field of higher education into an effective program of action. Based primarily on document review, this chapter also draws on private communication with 10 higher education experts either involved in UNESCO initiatives or on staff. The chapter is structured as follows: a historical review of UNESCO activities, suggesting how these activities have been shaped by the changes in the organization and in the wider UN environment; UNESCO activities in higher education over the past decade, assessing inparticular UNESCO’s response to the rapid globalization of higher education and its efforts to define a unique role for itself in the international higher education policy agenda; exploring the challenges posed to UNESCO’s work in higher education by current UN and UNESCO; and concluding with some preliminary thoughts on the key opportunities for UNESCO in the governance of higher education as a policy arena.

Relationships are central to the processes and outcomes for both decolonizing work in higher education and communities of practice that support faculty learning and professional development. Yet the development of these meaningful learning relationships is in direct tension with the isolation, precariousness, and impermanence of contract teaching faculty who make up more than half the academic labor force in Canadian universities. Our chapter describes a multidisciplinary online Contract Teaching Faculty (CTF) learning community called “Decolonizing and Indigenizing the Classroom.” Our community set out to challenge power relationships in interconnecting systems in higher education to make space for decolonizing work by building, deepening and expanding new and supportive learning relationships between CTF and with our students. As nine participants we look at the value of CTF learning communities by assessing the ongoing impacts of our commitment to transformative learning—our own and our students. We highlight the role CTF learning communities can play in inspiring and sharing pedagogical innovations. We outline the benefits of CTF learning communities for nurturing community and helping overcome the institutional isolation of CTF and our physical isolation exacerbated by the pandemic. We also recognize the challenges and limitations our CTF learning community faced. As precarious workers who are marginalized by this system that exploits and devalues CTF, how can we teach, model, and learn within the colonial systems at work in higher education when we are relatively powerless to affect change?

A successful civil engineering project is often a highly collaborative team-based activity, and the engineering education community must therefore prepare graduates to work in this type of environment. A large body of research has demonstrated the considerable benefits and minor organizational problems of collaborative work in higher education. However, there are only a few case studies reported in the literature that evaluate the positive and negative experiences encountered by students when undertaking group projects, and these invariably focus on first-year students. This paper contributes to this limited literature by assessing previously existing methodologies applied to group projects in the final year of an engineering degree, and compares the results with those obtained for students with no experience in collaborative work. The methodology was tested on a survey sample of 105 students enrolled in the Roads module of the new Civil and Territorial Engineering degree at the Technical Universi...

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic took a sledgehammer to the education sector, shattering the established structured systems, norms and rituals of practices and procedures. To ensure continuity whilst adhering to the pandemic-induced containment measures, higher education institutions adopted a remote work model to address the needs of a dispersed workforce. Amidst the uncertainty and continuous changes posed by the pandemic, remote working arrangements gradually dominated the higher education workspace, thereby increasing demands on institutions and employees. Consequently, the notion of resilience as a crucial constituent of Crisis Management has never been more salient. Yet surprisingly, there has been a paucity of literature in this domain. Whilst research on resilience is gaining interest, there is a need for a comprehensive overview of what the concept means for academics during an emergency and its application in the Crisis Management framework. This article addresses this research gap using a systematic Literature Review method to unearth the current state of scientific research regarding resilience in Crisis Management in the context of remote work during COVID-19. The findings of the study provide a research agenda that centers on understanding how resilience in Crisis Management and its strategic use in remote work can advance the research streams.

This co-produced study explores the experiences of autistic staff working in higher education in Ireland, a group largely overlooked in existing research. While much attention has been given to autistic students, little research has explored how autistic academics navigate their professional roles. This study investigates the challenges and strengths autistic staff encounter within academic environments. Eleven autistic participants took part in semi-structured interviews, conducted flexibly to respect individual preferences and communication needs. Data were analysed using the Reflexive Thematic Analysis. Four key themes emerged: (1) Discovering being autistic, (2) Role ambiguity and institutional invisibility, (3) Stress, burnout, and workplace unpredictability, and (4) Autistic strengths. Participants described strengths such as hyper-focus, problem-solving, and deep commitment to teaching while also highlighting barriers such as unclear expectations, a lack of visibility, and high emotional labour. The findings underscore the need for more inclusive institutional practices that reduce the pressure to mask and protect against burnout. Supporting autistic staff through affirming environments not only enables individuals to thrive but also enriches the wider educational community by fostering diverse approaches to teaching, learning, and communication.Lay AbstractThis study explores the experiences of autistic people who work as academic staff in universities. Autistic staff often face challenges such as unclear job expectations, misunderstandings from colleagues, and barriers to being open about their identity. Through interviews, we learned that many autistic academics care deeply about their work but feel unsupported in environments that reward constant social interaction, speed, and competition. Despite this, participants found creative ways to make space for themselves and others. This research helps us understand what autistic staff need to thrive in universities and shows why workplaces should value different ways of thinking, working, and communicating. Making these changes could benefit not only autistic staff but the wider academic community as well.

This chapter departs from a general acknowledgement that collaborative activities in small groups are productive for students’ learning. A range of so-called ‘student-centred’ approaches include elements of group work, in which students are required to engage in collaborative investigations, problem solving or knowledge co-construction. However, what it means for teachers to organize and support such learning, what students experience as challenging, and what support they might need is to an extent overlooked in the pedagogical practice in higher education. This chapter uses observations, interviews with teachers and students, course documents, and findings from case studies in two higher education courses wherein group work was a prevalent activity, to identify aspects what matter for the quality of collaborative learning in small group settings. Furthermore, the chapter highlights ways in which such learning activities are and can be pedagogically designed and enacted in order to support student engagement, and what are challenges accompanying this endeavour. Based on the insights gained through the aforementioned studies and analyses, the chapter discusses ways to inform quality work in higher education with a focus on the processes of teaching and learning.

This paper presents a qualitative research of the case study type that was held with professionals from various fields of knowledge (law, nursing, administration, education, accounting, medicine, physical therapy, journalism, economics, engineering, etc.), undergraduates who participated in a continuing education course, specifically, a specialization in continuing education to work in higher education in a community institution. The research problem that guided the research was: What are the contributions, implications and impacts of continuing education for teaching in higher education from the perceptions of professionals from various fields of knowledge? The research aimed to analyze the professionals’ repercussions of the process of continuing education for the practice of teaching in higher education. The research involved three classes of specialization of the following years: 2013, with 25 students; 2014 with 22 students and 2015 with 23 students, totaling 70 subjects investigated. Data were collected from a questionnaire with open and closed questions which has enabled content analysis from the perspective of Bardin (2011) with the help of Atlas Ti software. The results showed that the participation in the continuing education course contributed to teaching in higher education through the possibility of obtaining pedagogical knowledge and practical application of these, which culminated in a reflection on pedagogical practice, impacting directly on the professional work of these teachers, who only felt the lack of a more detailed work with the education of the distance mode.

In the transition from COVID-19 back to regular life, hybrid collaboration has gained increased attention. Currently, hybrid collaboration settings in higher education are not sufficient to support equal participation between co-located and remote students. In a first step, we conducted a literature review on the characteristics of co-located, remote, and hybrid collaboration settings involved in successful collaboration. The characteristics of these three types of collaboration were then used to identify design elements for hybrid collaboration settings that support equal participation in small-group work in higher education. In a second step, we designed an initial hybrid collaboration setting for higher education and implemented it in an exploratory study to identify additional features that support equal participation and to analyze collaboration between co-located and remote participants. From the results of this analysis, we identified 16 requirements to support equal participation in hybrid collaboration settings in higher education, which can serve as the basis for implementing and evaluating proposed solutions in a next step.

The neoliberalization of higher education in western countries has led to work intensification, projectification, and work-life balance issues for academics. This article draws on interviews with Digital Humanities practitioners in higher education conducted in 2017–2018 in three Nordic countries to introduce the concept of the ‘work-work balance’, an under-researched phenomenon in contemporary academe. The term ‘work-work balance’ refers to the ways in which workers in higher education seek to balance conflicting concurrent work demands made on them. Four such work scenarios emerged from the data: the 50/50 split across different jobs; working across multiple projects simultaneously; occupying multiple functional roles; and conflicting demands within one job. The article argues that work-work balance, or rather imbalance, issues result in the inability of higher education workers to meet the demands put upon them. This raises questions regarding the role of HEIs and research funding regimes in the generation and maintenance of work-work balance scenarios and suggests that work-work balance issues need to be researched further as well as requiring urgent attention from HEIs and research funders.

For the whole Party to be engaged in education requires that all departments and local organizations at different levels show concern for and lend support to our educational work. Those equipped to do so are allowed to set up schools of various types. In addition to the Ministry of Education, production departments, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the various provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions have all set up universities and colleges since liberation. This has become a practice unique to China's work in higher education, and these schools have trained a considerable number of qualified personnel for socialist construction. Nevertheless, defects still exist if judged by the normal pattern of development in higher education and from the perspective of training personnel of high quality and in new disciplines. Quite a few are institutions devoted to the study of a single discipline.

Reviewed by: Deadly Professors: A Faculty Development Mystery John H. Metoyer Thomas B. Jones. Deadly Professors: A Faculty Development Mystery. Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2010. 192 pp. Cloth: $19.95. ISBN: 978-1579224509. Thomas Jones’s second faculty development novel, Deadly Professors: A Faculty Development Mystery, is just that: a sophisticated faculty development guide neatly woven into the plot of a campy higher education murder mystery novel. As a work of fiction, Deadly Professors is a well-conceived parody of the mystery novel that takes place on the campus of a small, private, liberal arts campus in St. Paul, Minnesota. At the core of the mystery are Jack Ramble, literature professor and department chair, and a group of his undergraduate students, who haphazardly (and I mean this in the best possible sense) fall into the study of African American mystery authors while taking Ramble’s honors literature class. As a result of their research and Ramble’s alternative approach to teaching the literature course, the students are able to unearth the key clue that leads to the mystery’s resolution. Peppered throughout the novel are issues, concerns, and characters that should be familiar to anyone working in higher education: the bumbling administrator, debates over multiculturalism, the effect of digital technology on the modern classroom, the unsavory trustee, departmental infighting, funding issues, campaigns against the liberal arts, and generational gaps among faculty to name a few. All of these elements exist in the novel as a platform for what the book is actually about—faculty development. Jones, whose expertise lies, in part, in faculty development, includes a chapter-by-chapter guide of discussion questions and faculty development activities that touch on all of the issues raised throughout the novel. The deaths are as ghoulish and campy as anything you would find in a Vincent Price movie from [End Page 132] the 1970s, and many of the characters in the novel follow suit: over-the-top stereotypes whose flat predictabilities serve as a foil to the more realistic and likeable characters—faculty and students, of course. Toward the end of the fiction portion of the text, readers of a certain age will no doubt summon up the dénouement of almost every Scooby Doo episode: “And I would have gotten away with it, too. . . ” In fact, one line from Deadly Professors reads, “If it weren’t for you two professors and those students in your class, we’d have never suspected more than what was in front of our noses” (p. 155). Add a Great Dane and a psychedelic van, and you are there. Corn and campiness aside, Deadly Professors takes a light-hearted, fun, and fresh approach to what can be the bane of many professors’ careers: faculty development. While the book will be of great interest to faculty new to the profession, more seasoned professionals will also find value in the inclusive and novel means by which Jones approaches faculty development. The workshop portion of the text approaches professional enrichment through the lens of active learning. Development becomes a group activity that requires thought and conversation regarding serious issues facing most in American higher education. Deadly Professors is not a “how to” guide for dealing with contemporary issues on campus, but more of a “how would you” guide, allowing faculty to respond locally to problems facing campuses nationally. John H. Metoyer Vice President of Academic Affairs, City Colleges of Chicago—Harold Washington College Copyright © 2012 Association for the Study of Higher Education

Introduction This article seeks to isolate one major strand of work in American cultural anthropology together with its implications for the study of higher education. While the number of anthropologists who do research on higher education is fairly small, the importance of the field's theoretical and methodological contributions is significant. (1) Even though the number of people working in higher education is small, this article will not attempt to provide a comprehensive look at the field. Rather, I will begin with one set of important theoretical and methodological considerations in anthropology. I will then move to discussing some of the ways cultural anthropology makes contributions to the study of higher education. My own background as an anthropologist is very much tied up with the developments in anthropology that I will discuss. I've been heavily influenced by strands of critical theory, Marxist theory, cultural studies, semiotics, post structuralism, and postmodernism. These theoretical strands have been woven together by many cultural anthropologists in order to understand what Richard Johnson (1987) has called the Circuit of Cultural Production. What Johnson suggested is that as the cultural has been increasingly commodified, different theoretical models have been used to understand different portions of that process. He suggested that rather than seeing these theoretical trends as antagonistic, it is perhaps more useful to see them as incomplete. Johnson suggests that different theories explain different parts of the and that together they form a more complete understanding of the entire process of cultural production. It is in the spirit of Johnson's idea that I developed my own work. It is also in that spirit that we will briefly overview the development of theory in anthropology over the last twenty years. (2) The following section is one way to look at how anthropology has developed since about the early 1980s. It does not seek to be a complete intellectual history, but represents my own of how we can pull together theoretical developments in order to understand the of cultural production and how that circuit has become a transnational process. From Local Culture to Global System In the mid-1980s, George Marcus (1986, pp. 165-193) began to formulate one of cultural anthropology's key methodological problems as it moved from the study of isolated societies to looking at cultures, wherever they are found, to the study of societies deeply entwined with larger structural and cultural forces. He continued to contribute to this work over the next two decades (Marcus, 1998). A key issue that has always plagued cultural anthropology is that the main methodology of anthropologists, participant observation and ethnographic research, is very local. While it gives one a great deal of information about a specific location, it is questionable how broadly generalizable that information is. Since the beginning of modern ethnography, anthropologists have made the claim that the phenomenological conceit of being there and living amongst the natives gives one an understanding of the way of life and the native's view that can only be gotten in this way. (3) In the current world economy, Marcus argues that ethnography could engage in two main strategies that would allow it to locate its specific intimate knowledge of local interactions and individual consciousness in a broader set of structural forces, thus making ethnographic insights more useful in the contemporary world context. The first strategy he suggests is a kind of small world experiment for local communities. He suggests taking a number of local sites that have been studied ethnographically and exploring the political, economic, social, and cultural connections between them. Here the goal would be to have a theory of the global system and then to look at how these different locals are influenced by similar sets of pressures (Marcus, 1986, p. …

Quality in higher education has been at the top of the political agenda for years, motivating discussion of how to define quality and how standards and assessment can promote quality. However, the literature tends to overlook the processes and practices constituting ‘every-day’ quality. To improve quality, it is important to know how quality is perceived and enacted by the key stakeholders, namely the students, teachers, administrative staff and managers. Informed by the findings of a survey, this article aims to identify and compare the local practices of quality work at higher education institutions in Denmark. The analysis reveals that students, teachers and managers across sectors to a large extent share views on quality work highlighting practices that help develop students’ academic skills, the ability to apply these to practice and the continuous development of teaching practices. Some differences are however also apparent, for example, concerning employability orientation in higher education.