Search

In a flipped classroom, students engage in active learning during class time and have individual informationtransmission outside class time. University students need to complete the pre/post-class activities to fully benefit from flipped classroom. It is important that teachers adopt practical methods including teacher-student out-of-classroom communication (OCC) to help students manage their time effectively and stay on task. This research examines the practice of OOC in a flipped first-year postgraduate Business Law course at an Australian university that comprises a large overseas student cohort. By means of a questionnaire, the researcher collected data about student perceptions of OCC, their motives for engaging in OCC, and the change of the motives in a flipped classroom. Student demographics, online participation, and academic performance data were exported from the university database. The student answers, participation, and performance were measured and compared with t-tests. The preliminary results show that in a flipped classroom, students were more motivated to engage in OCC. Moreover, the short-term online participation improved for the students who were communicated by the teacher outside classroom. However, an analysis of the data indicated no statistically significant difference in students' academic performance. In the concluding sections of this paper, the limitations of this study are acknowledged, followed by several recommendations for future research.

The legal studies teaching methodology IRAC (issue, rule, application, conclusion) is widely used in universities by both law and business schools. This paper examines the effectiveness of IRAC from a teaching perspective and its usefulness for business students. Data is generated from an Australian university case study using teacher interviews and a student survey. The findings suggest that, because of its flexibility and logical structure, the practice of IRAC has become normalised. However it is only effective if teachers disseminate these features consistently in their teaching. Students in the study understood the usefulness of IRAC for classwork, but encountered application difficulties in assessment tasks. Although the study sample is limited, legal studies teachers in other tertiary and secondary settings can benefit from the findings, and the recommendations that periodic reflection and greater collaborative efforts are required when using IRAC to progress students' legal studies skills.

The expectation that schools should work in partnership to promote the achievement of children has arguably been the defining feature of school policy over the last decade. This rise in school-to-school partnerships and increased emphasis on multi-agency-based interventions for vulnerable children have seen the emergence of a new form of school leadership, required to simultaneously reconcile the pressures of cross-organizational partnership working with the demands of effectively leading a single institution. Based on original, doctoral research, this article discusses the fundamentally important role trust plays in assuring the leader's integrity and capability within this context. It explores the concept of trustworthy leadership, offering an innovative model for the emergence of trust and a three-dimensional framework to account for its manifestation in collaborative contexts. The article concludes that trustworthy leadership is fundamentally relational in nature and based on the leader's consistent modelling of their values in their day-to-day behaviours. Furthermore, it requires that followers perceive a flawless connection between these aspects, which in turn is dependent upon understandings as to the nature of professionalism within a specific context. Trustworthiness is therefore viewed as both an innate and attributed quality, the precise nature of which is contextually constructed. (Contains 2 figures and 1 table.)