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Purpose: Since new digital micro-credential technologies emerged a decade ago, there has been a rapid rise in micro-credentials in the education landscape. Much has been promised about these educational technologies, yet there is much confusion by key stakeholders in the digital micro-credential ecosystem. This confusion has led to significant efforts globally to define micro-credentials to ensure quality learning and generate beneficial impacts to learners, employers, education providers and edtech organisations. Design/methodology/approach: This commentary reviews relevant literature on digital micro-credentials and other alternative credentials to determine how these educational technologies can meet the demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to nurture lifelong learning for working learners. Findings: Universities are being challenged to address the changing needs and uncertainty being introduced by the Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolutions, particularly with implications for workforce upskilling and lifelong learning. To adapt, universities will need to rethink their roles and shift their institutional mindsets in how they may approach the challenges through mechanisms such as digital micro-credentials. Research limitations/implications: This paper focuses on the analysis of five policy statements about micro-credentials. While these policy statements represent a sample, there is a representation of Western education-related systems. Thus, they skew the findings towards Western education systems thinking. Practical implications: Understanding how micro-credentials are being positioned within education-related systems is useful for applying the educational technologies by, for example, universities, learners and employers. Social implications: Provides an overview of how these educational technologies may provide beneficial impacts for society as it plans to adapt to economic uncertainty and change. Originality/value: The commentary provides a policy context for the emerging use of micro-credential technologies to examine demands for workforce upskilling.

(Re)designing mathematics assessment tasks that prepare pre-service teachers for teaching and offer learning opportunities for developing pedagogical practice is a challenging endeavour for teacher educators. Collaborative, reflexive peer learning teams provide expertise and support in advancing effective curriculum work, such as assessment tasks. This case study sheds light on the impact of self-study to facilitate changes in curriculum work and improve learning outcomes for pre-service teachers and teacher educators, thus, is worthy of further exploration.

Blended learning has been evolving as an important approach to learning and teaching in tertiary education. This approach incorporates learning in both online and face-to-face modes and promotes deep learning by incorporating the best of both approaches. An innovation in blended learning is the use of an online media annotation tool (MAT) in combination with face-to-face classes. This tool allows students to annotate their own or teacher-uploaded video adding to their understanding of professional skills in various disciplines in tertiary education. Examination of MAT occurred in 2011 and included nine cohorts of students using the tool. This article canvasses selected data relating to MAT including insights into the use of blended learning focussing on the challenges of combining face-to-face and online learning using a relatively new online tool.

Increasing significance has been ascribed to student engagement, as a measure of success of both teachers and programs. However, since users of the term commonly tend not to explain, rationalise or problematise their understanding of engagement, its value to understand or transform learning may be limited. While clarification has occurred in conceptual work, there is a lack of empirical work that extends beyond understandings of engagement-as-behaviour, as well as insufficient work exploring what students understand engagement to be. Further, much work on engagement is rooted in physical campuses and face-to-face delivery, which represents an incomplete picture of how students actually engage in study. This article investigates student perceptions of engagement in two blended learning Initial Teacher Education programs. It offers a critical discussion of how research can be re-considered in light of changing learning contexts and changing understandings of ways to investigate engagement. The findings of this study support previous work that found multiple levels and meanings of student engagement exist. New complex and multidimensional models of engagement are proposed, which can open new possibilities for designing studies and analysing findings. This article argues that including and questioning physical, virtual and political contexts and power, affect, relationships, linearity and essential measurability are important features of new models of engagement.

As institutions of education and learning, the higher education sector has a significant role to play in implementing the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014). Some institutions have already acknowledged, and are shaping, their roles in working towards sustainability through appropriate development and implementation of institutional policy and practices, including the signing of international agreements related to sustainability. Such institutions are specifically linking learning to sustainable development. This study was initiated as a result of our interests to i) identify the current commitment to education for sustainability and ii) learn from the institutional lived experiences about how education for sustainability may be realised, within the Australian university context. This is a preliminary investigation to provide baseline insights into how education for sustainability with a focus on curriculum innovation is being implemented within the Australian university landscape. This investigation is informing our further research to understand institutional change of education for sustainability in universities. (Contains 4 tables, 2 figures and 1 endnote.)

Amidst Australia's background of ecological devastation there is hope as people and their communities search for ways to re-think and revision their future, moving ever so slowly towards sustainability. For the author, sustainability is the intersection where humanity consciously engages with the ecological systems in ways to ensure all life is supported over time: people, plants, animals, microscopic phyla as well as life represented by genetic diversity and the complexity of ecosystem diversity. She believes that the key to achieving sustainability lies with education for sustainability where it enables humanity to respond, anticipate, create, negotiate, and participate in working and living towards sustainability. In this article, the author explores and examines the intricacies of Education for Sustainability through the help of her past roles in Environmental Education, and reflects on her country's efforts in grappling with the implications of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. (Contains 1 footnote and 1 table.)

Byline: Josephine Chinying Lang This paper reviews how a land-scarce city-state is trying to achieve its goals of zero landfill and zero waste through the greening of industry. The main challenges Singapore confronts in its solid waste management are an increasing volume of industrial waste generated, a shortage of land for landfills, and escalating costs of incineration plants. To green its industries, there has been a coordinated effort to develop a recycling industry and to initiate public-private partnerships that will advance environmental technologies. Case studies on the steel, construction, waste incineration, and the food retail industry illustrate the environmental progress that has been made. These cases show also the crucial role played by the government in accelerating the greening of industry by facilitating the formation of strategic collaborations among organisations, and by reconciling the twin objectives of sustainability and profitability.

This paper argues that social contexts and social capital enable knowledge integration; that different social contexts combined with different types of social capital enable different types of knowledge integration. Four types of social contexts are distinguished based on the extent of social embeddedness and closeness of interorganizational coupling; four types of social capital are also described. Based on the diversity of knowledge streams, the extent of tacitness of knowledge to be exchanged, and value created through such exchanges, four modes of knowledge integration are identified, namely frontier, incremental, combinative, and instrumental. This paper provides new insights about the processes of interorganizational transfer of knowledge: the unique combination of a specific social context with a specific type of social capital means firms can achieve equally effective yet highly differentiated approaches to different modes of knowledge integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews emergent global trends in intellectual property protection and identifies patenting as a strategic initiative. Recent developments in software and method-of-doing-business patenting are fast transforming the e-business landscape. The article discusses the emergent global regulatory framework concerning intellectual property rights and the strategic value of patenting. Important features of a corporate patenting portfolio are described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]