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Research on policy enactment has explored tensions created by accountability approaches associated with new forms of management under neoliberalism. These approaches generate particular discursive constructs of the ‘good teacher’ – constructs that often negate the rich, unmeasurable, and ethical practices associated with teacher professionalism. This paper draws on data generated as part of an institutional ethnography at an Australian school. Five teachers reflected on their work and the policies and procedures that govern it. They reported a range of practices for coping with the demands of policy enactment; described by one informant using the heuristic of attachment, aversion, and indifference. Significantly, the influence of external contingency – specifically in the form of climate change – represents a complex space in which teachers must navigate using ethical judgment and practical wisdom. This kind of ethical work creates demands that exceed the circumscribed notions of good teaching present in governing policies. Taking up the Foucauldian concept of counter conduct, this paper argues that these ‘unofficial’ practices are an expression of ethical professionalism. Rather than being explicitly ‘activist’, these teachers are simply engaging in ‘good work’ as it might be understood under the external contingencies associated with a changing and challenging world.

There is a contradiction of intensive national policy efforts and the slow pace of change in widening participation in England. This paper focuses on the use of contextual data in STEM subjects, where there has been less progress in widening access and a more rigid entry pathway through A-level study. Interviews with admissions tutors suggest a narrative in which STEM curricula, and the prior knowledge and skills required to succeed within it are fixed, and that attempts to widen participation and broaden the notion of ‘best students’ could undermine academic standards and the student experience. The paper draws on social justice and social reproduction theoretical frameworks to explore policy enactment, identifying support for widening participation and the effects of a conservative ethos amongst academics. The tension of these approaches, alongside the autonomy of decision-makers, are key dynamics explaining the inertia of policy efforts for change.

Communication in online learning environments became essential in the global pandemic and lockdown. Apart from online lectures and classes, many educators began or increased their use of asynchronous text discussion boards. Often educators are faced with a choice of many different discussion boards or tools and would benefit from better understanding how students may engage with these different types. This study explores the use of three different asynchronous text discussion tools used in Canvas Learning Management System (LMS), by drawing upon the concept of ‘set design’ from the Activity Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD) framework. Discussion boards are conceptualised as shaping the learning activity which occurs in it, as the physical (digital and material) elements and the social context of discussion. To understand how the educational design of discussions intersects with technological affordances and barriers, this exploratory study adopted a qualitative approach to data collection. Over a period of one year, university business students enrolled in four postgraduate subjects (including accounting, finance, and leadership subjects) and an undergraduate first year business subject were invited to share their perceptions of online discussion boards. Participation in the discussion boards was voluntary and ungraded, and were designed as either a space to ask questions and elaborate on topics, to critique and construct knowledge, or share ideas. Data from ten student focus groups was thematically analysed, refined and coded, to compare different types of student engagement with three different online asynchronous discussion tools in five different courses with varying course designs. The findings reveal that different discussion tools may satisfy different needs, even if educators’ design intentions and expectations around discussions often do not match students. Furthermore, the value of discussion boards may be better assessed as part of a learning ecosystem, rather than evaluated as discrete tools. Future research directions are suggested in analysing how discussion boards are shaped by technology, and to support educators to understand the design of online conversations across different tools to make evidence-based decisions.

Global policy development in schooling often looks to solutions that embrace technology and articulate a ‘what works’ approach to practice. This paper takes as a case study the Australian Government’s Through Growth to Achievement report on achieving school excellence. It analyses the report through the lens of ‘sublimes’, which provide insight into the way certain policy rhetoric can become reified. Through Growth to Achievement emphasises technological solutions which align with and reify an aesthetic notion of good teaching that draws on the ‘what works’ literature. This analysis argues that certain assumptions about technology, teacher practice and the ‘evidence’ for good policy are based on these reifications. A sublimes analysis makes these unspoken assumptions explicit and reveals the way they reinforce globalised policy approaches and foreclose others.

Policy and industry decision makers place high priority on the contribution of biomass to the emerging low carbon, circular economy. Optimisation of performance, from the perspectives of environmental, social and economic sustainability and resource efficiency, is essential to successful development and operation of biomass value chains. The complexity of value chains, which comprise interrelated stages from land use to conversion and multiple end products, presents challenges.To date, decision makers have approached from the viewpoints of single market sectors or issues, such as market shares of bioeconomy and reduction of carbon emissions to mitigate climate change. This approach does not achieve a full understanding of value chains and their competitive priorities, limits consumer awareness, and poses risks of sub-optimal performance and under-development of potential local capacity.This paper presents a conceptual framework that combines value chain analysis and competitive priority theory with indicators suitable to measure, monitor and interpret sustainability and resource efficiency at value chain level. The case of biomass Combined Heat and Power (CHP) is used to illustrate how optimisation strategies can be focused to address challenges in value chain stages which will lead to better performance and uptake of sustainably sourced, widely accepted biomass options. Highlights •Biomass is a key component in policy for low carbon and circular economy.•Decision makers are increasingly exploring varied, innovative value chains with high complexity.•They face challenges with sustainability, fragmented metrics, and decisions often lack coherent systems thinking.•This prevents developing optimisation strategies to overcome challenges and create value at local level.•This paper combines value chain and competitive priority theory to assess performance and enable efficient decision making.

The challenge: redesign the student experience in large core units in the Business School. Enter CLaS: the Connected Learning at Scale project to re-engage learners inside and outside the classroom through designing and leveraging educational technology across physical and digital spaces, for an active learning experience with practical, real-world application. We share our learnings so far in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) as a lever to draw learners and 21st century learning together.

With more graduates, degree outcomes have a renewed significance for high-achieving students to stand out in a graduate crowd. In the United Kingdom, over a quarter of undergraduates now leave university with the highest grade – a ‘first-class’ degree – although students from non-traditional and underprivileged backgrounds are the least likely. This article explores the experiences of high-achieving non-traditional (HANT) university students. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 30 final-year students who are on course to achieve a first-class degree from working-class, minority ethnic and/or mature backgrounds, we examine their pathways to academic success through identity works and negotiations. We argue that early successes are crucial for students to re-evaluate their self-expectations as students who can achieve in higher education, while self-esteem, pride or fear can prevent students from maximising their available resources and opportunities. Implications for practice and policy are discussed, including the reflective advice from HANT students towards academic success.

From its inception, learning analytics (LA) offered the potential to be a game changer for higher education. However, accounts of its widespread implementation, especially by teachers, within institutions are rare which raises questions about its ability to scale and limits its potential to impact student success. Additionally, amidst the backdrop of higher education’s contemporary challenges including massification and diversification, entire cohorts (not just those identified as “at risk” by traditional LA) feel disconnected and unsupported in their learning journey. Increasing pressures on teachers are also diminishing their ability to provide meaningful support and personal attention to students. For LA, related adoption barriers have been identified including workload pressures, lack of suitable or customizable tools, and unavailability of meaningful data. In this chapter, we present a teacher-friendly 'LA lifecycle' that seeks to address these challenges and critically assess the adoption and impact of a unique solution in the form of an LA platform that is designed to be adaptable by teachers to diverse contexts. In this chapter, these contexts span three universities and over 72,000 students and 1,500 teachers. This platform, the Student Relationship Engagement System (SRES), allows teachers to collect, curate, analyze, and act on data of their choosing that aligns to their specific contexts. It also provides the ability to close the loop on support actions and guide reflective practice. In contrast to other platforms that focus on data visualization or algorithmic predictions, the SRES directly helps teachers to act on data to provide at-scale personalized support for study success. This way, the nuances of learning designs and teaching contexts can be directly applied to data-informed support actions. In our case studies, we highlight how this practical approach to LA directly addressed teachers’ and students’ needs of timely and personalized support and how the platform has impacted student and teacher outcomes. Through this, we develop implications for integrating teachers’ specific needs into LA, the forms of tools that may yield impact, and perspectives on authentic LA adoption.

Despite the commitment to engagement with the broader community that is central to understandings of the role of academics within the university tradition, there are now significant barriers to the performance of this role. Significant changes in the management, funding and priorities of universities (prompted by government policy) have created conditions where community engagement is placed a distant third in the professional lives of contemporary academics behind research and teaching. Some have suggested that community engagement is not just a low priority activity in modern academia, but one that is consciously discouraged through questioned academic freedoms, more tenuous employment circumstances, and restrictive codes of conduct conditions at several universities. In addition, the widespread work intensification that has accompanied these other changes in University management has created significant disincentive to engage in community engagement for early career academics, women with children, and those seeking a healthy work-life balance. This paper argues that while there has been much discussion of the privileging of research over teaching, the value and commitment to community service remains at the margins of reality and debate in Australian universities, and will continue to be while these challenges remain., Toowoomba, QLD

This study sought to identify factors that influenced the perceived complexity of providing nursing care to others (who were dependent on alcohol and tobacco) and the confidence of undergraduate student nurses to carry out this care. The research project was designed to explore whether there was a difference between the perceived complexities of 57 different nursing tasks and skills as understood by student nurses and their differing ages, gender and types of first language used. By using a probabilistic measurement approach (Rasch model), the study sought to assess whether a scale of performance for learning could be constructed based on the difficulty of nursing care required and the self-rated capacity of the undergraduate nursing students to provide the nursing care. Outcomes of the study suggest that nursing students do differ significantly both in how they view the complexity of providing nurse care and their capacity to provide that nursing care. Recommendations are made for informing nursing education programs, in a bid to make nursing care as it relates to others who are substance dependent, more effective. [Author abstract]

While student difficulty with academic referencing is not new, it is apparent that many tertiary students are not skilled in following referencing conventions, are confused about what does and does not constitute plagiarism in the eyes of academics, and are fearful of the consequences. This paper begins by examining the cases of a number of students at an Australian university who have been suspected of academic dishonesty. It examines the students' prior instruction on academic referencing, and their understanding of the plagiarism policy of the university concerned. It also examines the feedback that staff have given the students concerned and how useful that has been from the students' perspectives. While researching this topic, issues relating to how suspected plagiarism cases are handled emerged. This paper is an initial exploration of some of the issues that arise when handling referencing and plagiarism at tertiary institutions, which affect both students and staff.

A hypothetical model was formulated to explore factors that influenced academic and clinical achievement for graduate-entry medical students completing their third year of university studies. Nine latent variables were considered including the students' background, previous successes with their undergraduate and postgraduate studies and their assessed ability to study graduate-entry medicine based on their scholastic aptitude and their interview selection scores. The academic and clinical achievement of 99 graduate-entry medical students were estimated by measuring their performance on two separate assessment procedures, a 150 item multiple choice examination and a 20 item objectively structured clinical evaluation (OSCE) test. These two assessments were taken across two years (to include two student groups) and were equated using Rasch scaling procedures. Models identifying causal pathways leading to academic and clinical achievement were tested using Partial Least Squares Path Analysis (PLSPAT). The study's results suggest that medical student achievement can be predicted by variables, which account for 6 to 22 percent of the variance of scores that assess academic achievement and clinical performance at the third year level respectively. The most significant predictors and those which had direct influence on graduate-entry medical student achievement were: (a) student gender, undergraduate grade point average scores, type of undergraduate studies undertaken, and where those studies were carried out that were related to the OSCE scores, and (b) whether or not the graduate-entry medical students had pursued other studies prior to undertaking the medical course and age that were both negatively related to achievement on the multiple choice examination. Measures of performance at interview and student scores for GAMSAT that were used in the selection process were not related to the performance outcomes assessed. [Author abstract]

This paper uses Kenya's survey data to explore ethnic inequalities in education in Kenya. It focuses on some ethnic groups that may have resources and opportunities as a result of their geographical location and ethnic proximity to the ruling elite. The factors examined to explain potential educational inequalities among ethnic groups include the Gross Enrolment Ratios, the number of schools, and the number of qualified teachers. The results suggest a close correspondence of differentials between inequalities in education and ethnic affiliation to the ruling elite. Relatively small, clearly defined ethnic groups have accumulated an advantage over the majority in the national population, in terms of the education infrastructure and resources. Based on these results, this paper argues that ethnicity should be placed at the forefront of analyses of educational development in Kenya, as well as in policy efforts to reduce inequalities in education. [Author abstract] Notes: Refereed article. Includes bibliographical references.

Online delivery methods that replicate aspects of face-to-face teaching and facilitate learning at a distance are becoming a more common teaching and learning approach in Australian universities teaching external international students. This paper examines a trial of a new online method of course delivery, using a CD-ROM as the basis of materials provision, communication and interaction, for a group of Thai doctoral students in a course at Flinders University in South Australia called Approaches to Research. The paper uses a case study approach and employs a focus group to collect data. The twin purposes of the paper are to describe the two methods of course delivery in which Approaches to Research is taught and to investigate the views of the Thai student group about the success of replicating face-to-face with online teaching. The findings of the paper, which are organised into themes, may provide pointers to university staff contemplating the use of online teaching to facilitate learning at a distance for international students. [Author abstract]