By Jamil Salmi. In order to accelerate the transformation process towards building “world-class” universities, a few governments - China, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and Spain, for example - have launched so-called “excellence initiatives”, consisting of large injections of additional funding to boost the performance of their university sector. Read more...

By Ararat L. Osipian. In April 2016, following the widely publicized pepper-spraying of protesters by campus police, the Chancellor of University of California Davis, Linda Katehi, was criticized for spending $175,000 on outside consultants for Internet search optimization in order to diminish online references to the incident so the public would see a more favorable image of UC-Davis. Read more...

By Paul Ashwin. When the quality of research and teaching are measured in higher education, the focus tends to be on the individual performance of inspirational academics. This ignores their fundamentally collective character. In order to explore this, I first examine the nature of research and how this should inform our measures of research quality and then do the same for teaching. Read more...

By Andrys Onsman. The news that the Office of Teaching and Learning is to be shut down has been met with a remarkable lack of fanfare. The OLT is the federal organisation that supports research and innovation in teaching and learning in Australia and provides rewards for outstanding teaching across the entire tertiary sector in the country. Read more...