Exploration of Multi-cultural Teaching and Learning in a Collaborative Virtual Environment

The chapter details the experiences both students and instructors encountered in creating and participating in a cross-cultural virtual team conducted predominantly in a virtual environment. We describe problems encountered and often (though not always) overcome. Students learned both the rewards and the frustrations such teams experience as they learned to participate in and contribute to the collective intelligence of the team.

Navigating a Pathway to Partnership through Turbulent Seas of Adversity

Many adult professionals no longer have the time or finances to engage in full time, on site study, and as a consequence are seeking flexible alternatives. Some institutions have been slow to react to this change. The organisation described herein has been quicker to react but this movement towards change also poses its own unique issues. These issues are discussed and analysed by three students who have participated in a part-time programme of doctoral studies while embedded in their research context. But, one of the drawbacks of conducting a study such as this though is the contemporary lack of statistics on the actual dichotomy of provision between conventional and alternative modes of teaching in the higher education sector. The reason for this is that higher education organisations in Britain operate in a competitive and individualised manner rather than as a cohesive block.

Transformation through Marketing

A historically white school in a city setting in South Africa is faced with the demand from a newly democratically elected government to transform and become an agent of change in making its pupil profile more representative of the demographics of the country as a whole. This demand is driven by significant national contextual change from a position where schools had an allocated catchment based upon geographical area and ethnic group (before 1994) to a market oriented approach where every school must compete for pupil recruitment to ensure survival whilst also adhering to the government requirement to demonstrate a willingness to change existing mono-cultural pupil profiles to multi ethnic profiles and establish non-sexism and non-racialism as the dominating culture.

School Images, School Identity, and How Parents Select Schools for Their Children

The case suggests that a school organization adapts itself to the environment and survives external competition through a series of self-organizing processes of differentiation and integration. Differentiation is the process through which the school develops its own identity and core competencies through trial and error, whereas integration is the process through which the school develops stable and sustaining relationships with parents and other strategic partners within the community. The authors assert that in a fast changing and highly competitive environment like that in Hong Kong, schools need to find their institutional identities and to present a positive image to the community. This endeavor is often a challenging and painful task. The authors study the case of a secondary school to illustrate how this can be done, employing a survey approach to ascertain needs and expectations of parents. The dilemma schools face in choosing between academic and pastoral ethos is described and relations between important factors that impact perceptions of parents are discussed.

Heterogeneity Analysis in the University Context

The transformations being experienced by Spanish universities faced with the challenge of adapting to a changing environment and increasingly discerning and segmented demand highlights the importance of knowing the needs and wishes of students as main customers. The present study attempts an in-depth examination of the viability of student perceptions of service quality as a segmentation criterion. We go deeply into the dimensionality of university service quality and we analyze how such dimensions can be used to segment effectively the collective of students’ degrees using latent methodology. The results based on information gathered from 287 questionnaires permit analysis of existing heterogeneity and a set of recommendations to be made for strategic management in the area of university services.

Using Text Mining for Improving Student Experience Management in Higher Education

The objective of this case study is to illustrate how text mining of open-ended responses from a student survey could yield valuable information for improving student experience management (SEM). The concept of student SEM was borrowed from the notion of customer experience management (CEM), which aims for ongoing improvement of customer relations through understanding of the customer’s point of view (Pine & Gilmore 1998). With the advance of text mining technology, textual data that were previously underutilized are found to be valuable in CEM. To illustrate how text mining can be applied to SEM, we discuss an example from a campus-wide survey conducted at Arizona State University. The purpose of this survey was to better understand student experiences with instructional technology in order for administrators to make data-driven decisions on its implementation. Rather than imposing the researchers’ preconceived suppositions on the students by using force-option survey items, researchers on this project chose to use open-ended questions in order to elicit a free emergence of themes from the students. The most valuable lesson learned from this study is that students perceive an ideal environment as a web of mutually supporting systems. Specifically, online access should be augmented by use of laptops and availability of course materials, whereas virtual classes should be balanced by human interactions.

Technology in the Development and Teaching of a Literacy Program for XXI Century Education

A key capacity in twenty-first century markets is being able to convert information to knowledge. This information is frequently a written form in e-text contexts. Individuals able to read, comprehend, and execute the information more effectively can use more efficiently the resources available in the marketplace. The study examined the influence of teaching individuals to read and comprehend hypertext. Its findings contribute to advancement of knowledge in this area and indicate ways in which individuals can improve their capacity to convert e-text to knowledge.

Innovations in Technology for Educational Marketing

This chapter highlights the importance of educational marketing through modern innovative technologies. It explores how teachers who mark Rwandan primary and secondary examinations perceive the Rwanda National Examinations Council and what the implications are for the effective management of the examinations system. The chapter highlights the Rwandan context in which before the 1994 genocide, the education system was characterized by nepotism, corruption, discrimination and victimization based on ethnicity, regionalism, and gender. Thus, after 1994, the task of the education system was to reverse the imbalance in favor of equity, transparency, accountability and responsiveness in public service. In terms of national examinations, this demanded, among other things, a vigorous marketing strategy through innovation and technology. In spite of the relative success, however, the chapter acknowledges challenges associated with post-conflict educational reconstruction focusing mainly on human resource capacity development and management, and highlights some lessons learned as Rwanda looks forward to the future.

Exporting Hong Kong’s Higher Education to Emerging Asian Markets

The purpose of this study is to examine the current conditions of higher education services in three Asian markets and to explore effective market strategies and supportive government policies to further promote Hong Kong’s higher education in the region. It is evident from the findings that the visibility of Hong Kong’s higher education in these Asian markets was extremely low. The low visibility of Hong Kong’s higher education in the Asian region was due to a lack of concerted and coordinated effort between the Hong Kong government and higher education institutions in promoting their higher education. The study points to the need for more wide-ranging and coherent marketing strategies and government policies in order to attract the growing number of international students.

Marketing Services Globally

E-learning and distance learning technologies have accelerated tremendously during the last decade. Changes in development and delivery include altered instructional methods and the expansion of support services for e-learning activities. Many business and political leaders speculate that globalization is indeed connecting international political, economic, cultural, and social life. These new Information Technologies significantly affect most aspects of higher education. Changes in teaching/learning and administration have impacted everyone associated with applying technology to global delivery of services. E-learning has increasingly become the vehicle of choice for many corporate clients who are actively engaged in creating diverse international markets for their goods and services.