Media Streaming for Technological Innovation in Higher Education

Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) can be slow in responding to technological innovation. Streaming technology offers a competitive advantage to a HEI if appropriately adopted and integrated with the marketing strategy compared to the Push-Pull strategy: when all available technological innovation is used to push educational options to the market and the potential people pull from the market. This chapter briefly describes the concepts of e-learning and media streaming, and their relationship to HEIs. The intangible business benefits of using media streaming to enhance teaching and learning in HEIs are explored through a literature review and small sample survey. The case study of a UK university is used to represent a HEI; e-learning technology is already in use within the university, considering the integration of media streaming technology into new or existing learning technologies. The hardware and software requirements are briefly examined, and possible business concerns and risks are identified with recommendations.

A Conceptual Framework for E-Assessment in Higher Education

The assessment of competences requires an approach where knowledge, abilities, and attitudes are integrated, naturally implying the resource to a variety of assessment strategies. Within this context, we have seen the emergence of what has been called by several authors, the Assessment Culture. Furthermore, Higher Education e-learning environments have also promoted the use of new e-assessment strategies. Therefore, it is important to reconsider the concept of quality assessment in Higher Education online contexts, and particularly how to develop it in the present learning landscapes. In this chapter, the authors present a new conceptual framework for digital assessment in Higher Education supported by four dimensions—authenticity, consistency, transparency, and practicability—each composed by a set of criteria, aimed at promoting the quality of the assessment strategies being used. This framework was developed based on the expansion of the concept of validity supported by edumetric qualities.

The Global Scholar

This chapter addresses the challenges associated with college faculty members crossing international borders to be employed by higher education institutions. This process includes challenges associated with the technical aspects of recruiting and hiring faculty members of different nationalities and then the subsequent challenges of understanding cultural dynamics in the classroom and how faculty members can be prepared to deal with these cultural differences. The chapter includes a practical analysis of these issues and concludes with recommendations for the stronger institutional integration of transnational faculty to higher education institutions.

Building a Case of Student Experience for Sustainable Higher Education in Transnational Environment

This chapter sets ground to realize the exceptional significance of students to international branch campuses, which is a popular mode of transnational higher education. Mission statements of different international branch campuses are analyzed that converge on the fact that most of these institutions irrespective of the host country perceive student as their priority. The chapter then moves on to explaining student choice, in a situation where number of international branch campuses co-exist in a home country, such as the case of United Arab Emirates that hosts 19% of the world’s current branch campuses (Observatory, 2012). This information is then employed to expound how international branch campuses can progressively build student experience. Within this chapter, readers can find steps to build student experience in the first year of operation, followed by fine steps that can assist in progressively developing student experience. The chapter then addresses the significance of students in transnational higher education and how this can be developed, leveraged, and converted to be a potent tool such as to ensure sustainable branch campuses (a form of transnational higher education).

Education and Literature for Development in Responsibility

In order to propose quality assurance for cutting-edge transnational higher education management, this chapter first analyzes data on academic developmental journals while making use of the three widely known literature databases ISI Thomson, Scopus, and Google Scholar; the latter analyzed by the software Publish or Perish (PoP). Time series of data for documents and their citations provide indices; this chapter provides as most helpful indices the ISI impact factor, Scopus SNIP, and PoP AW index. A dozen of the most influential developmental journals are heuristically ranked by taking into account all available indices from all three literature databases. The series of historic bibliometric data since the 1950s shows the dynamics of the global emergence of developmental journals and developmental thought. Secondly, and as a possible template for similar initiatives in global higher education management, this chapter presents the recently established “Global Studies” (GS) Master’s curriculum at Graz University, Austria. Details on this novel curriculum’s targets, modules, courses, and practicals are given. GS embraces six modules and courses from different schools at university. Emphasis is placed on dialogic interdisciplinary understanding and interparadigmatic integration of multiple disciplines and perspectives, when managing education for the purpose of responsibly hedging and managing globalization and socio-economic global change in responsible partnership.

University Student Absenteeism

Work on university student absenteeism is an interesting topic that treats motivation problems and its important consequences, like dropout, but is not easy to measure. In this chapter, the authors make a revision of the concept and an empirical approach to the possible reasons of student absenteeism through multivariate analyses—which the students themselves believe to be justified—and those offered by the faculty members in the case of the authors’ big school (with nine studies and 12,000 students), of the authors’ university (with 70,000 students), in the authors’ country. The analysis was carried out on two samples (1,161 students and 181 professors), which indicates that the reasons offered by each population are not the same. Through a cluster analysis, it is possible to identify six student performance profiles, which sheds some light on understanding this fact and the opportunity to suggest some ways of action.

Developing and Supporting the Internationalisation of Research Capacity

The internationalisation of education is a common and perhaps overused term that is still little understood. Developments have been made in the areas of recruitment, overseas delivery, and branch campus creation, but the extent to which our institutions are truly “international” is debatable, especially in light of the fact that few can agree on what is meant by the term itself. The need to collaborate, discuss, reflect, and learn from others is vital for developing nations and developed nations alike. It is in the process of sharing best practice that best practice can itself be developed and further enhanced. Engagement, on a glocal scale, can support integrated learning, contextual understanding, and the internationalisation of research capacity and as such, is an area for further review and reflection.

Optimal Motivation and Governance of Education Agents

This chapter addresses the issue of marketing higher education institutions through education agents, focusing on ways to gain a competitive advantage over other institutions in the context of increasing global competition while maintaining close management and governance of this distribution channel. Qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with 31 Australian university international marketing managers and staff, and 16 education agents based in Australia and overseas. The findings show seven main themes, namely, service and support, joint promotion, incentives, training, gifts, social activities, and relationship enhancement. The contributions of this chapter are the provision of experiences, ideas, attitudes, and perspectives of how Australian universities work in partnership with education agents throughout the world to recruit international students in an increasingly competitive marketplace, whilst ensuring obligations are met under Australian international education legislation. This chapter provides marketing specialists, educational administrators, and policy makers with practical real life examples of motivational and management techniques.

Examining Adjustment Challenges of Mainland Chinese Students in Hong Kong

The purpose of this chapter is to examine major adjustment challenges facing mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong. Even though a large amount of studies have been carried out to understand adjustment issues of mainland Chinese students studying overseas, few are with students in Hong Kong. This study aims to deepen our understanding of the major adjustment issues of this particular group. The current study employed both quantitative and qualitative methods and included over 300 mainland Chinese students studying in seven major government-funded universities. The findings of this study point to the need that individual tertiary institutions and the Hong Kong government should step up their effort in responding sufficiently and flexibly in meeting the critical needs of these mainland Chinese students by paying additional attention to the quality and accessibility of both education-related services and non-education factors.

Observations through a Keyhole

Global higher education leaders face the most explosive political environment in the history of higher education in the world due to decreased financial resources coupled with increased accountability. As revenues become scarcer, calls for accountability continually increase the five often-competing forces driving change in global higher education. In order to gain a more holistic view of accountability, the authors focus on five major shifts in global higher education: 1) Supply: financing; move from state-supported to state-assisted; 2) Demand: students; by 2020 minority students will be the majority; 3) Delivery: competition; faculty, f2f, online, technology, etc.; 4) Structure: new structures in different locations, internationalization, no longer brick and mortar, brick and click; 5) Productivity: management by objectives and results orientation.