This report presents key evidence from ‘Religion and belief in higher education: researching the experiences of staff and students’, a research project commissioned by ECU. The research methods used for this project took into consideration institutional contexts and backgrounds to religion or belief issues to ensure sensitivity to the issues involved. The project utilised the experience of the project stakeholder group in designing all research approaches.

Twitter is a social media platform that has been used in teaching and learning. The aim was to explore students’ views of using Twitter as an adjunctive learning tool to provide access to contemporary information, to enhance learning and to generate wider discussion via Twitter backchannel communication. A 17-item Qualtrics questionnaire consisting of open and closed questions was devised specifically for the study. Qualitative data was analysed using descriptive statistics. Qualitative data via thematic analysis. Participants were a convenience sample of 44 Level 4 Social Welfare Law students who were invited to engage online with the academic and professional community via Twitter. Eleven (25%) students responded to the questionnaire. Four key themes emerged from the qualitative data: Enhancing knowledge; Building academic and professional networks; Time for twitter and the Need for Twitter training. Despite the limitations, the results suggest that if supported by institutional digital scaffolding and training, twitter may be a useful adjunct to traditional physical learning spaces. Further research is r however required to explore the future pedagogic potential of Twitter.

Having a lifelong interest in knowledge and learning, I view the claims and practices of education and higher education practices with active and interested skepticism, which comes out of a profound optimism – that what we have now is not the best we could have. Higher education should always be in the best interests of the individual being educated, tempered by the interests of society at large; above all, education should do no harm. It seems to me that this “bottom up” approach, whereby improving the thinking abilities of individuals improves the behavior of whole societies is the primary reason for the expensive activity of education. Economic research indicates correlations between education and state prosperity (Berger and Fisher 2013) though benefits of increased productivity may not necessarily be equally distributed. Furthermore, the causal mechanisms at play are not finely elucidated.

It became almost fashionable to refer to the term “flipped” in higher education. Expressions like flipped learning and flipped classroom are often used interchangeably as an indication of innovation, flexibility, creativity and pedagogical evolution. We performed an exploratory study on this topic following the Critical Interpretive Synthesis methodology for analysis of the literature. Our findings indicated that the term “Flipped Learning” is misleading and that, in fact, the synthetic concept behind it is “Flipped Teaching”. We derived a synthesising argument, in the format of two synthesis models, of the potential benefits promoted by flipped teaching and the potential issues which affect its success in practice. Those models allow STEM course tutors not only to make informed decisions about whether to flip teaching or not, but also to better prepare for flipping.

Abstract — This paper takes as its starting point a brief review of a range of theoretical assumptions about the nature of career learning and decision-making and plots the emergence of the notion of ‘employability’ as a predominant paradigm for the organisation and delivery of career guidance services in UK higher education. The acquisition of employability skills in students is essentially a deficit paradigm that the provision of work-oriented learning opportunities seeks to address. A key driver for the development of employability as an institutional priority is policy-making by governmental agencies that foregrounds university-business partnerships as a component of economic generation. The development of workbased learning (WBL) and work placements as part of higher education courses is shown to exemplify how responsibility for students’ employability development is increasingly shared between institutions and (prospective) employers. The paper draws upon recent research findings that explore issues of quality assurance in WBL and work placements and poses questions for institutional services aimed to support students’ transition from higher education to the labour market. Access to WBL and work placements appears to be stratified and different types of opportunity are taken up by particular groups of students. A relatively new way of conceptualising career learning as ‘career adaptability’ has been developed out of theories of career ‘constructivism’ and is suggested to provide a return to a more student-centred paradigm which has the potential to be more inclusive. Career adaptability is exemplified by the use of the career adaptability scale to support students’ self assessment of their career learning and development.