Search results

This is a summary and some of the conclusions reached after completing the first innovatory analysis of the general trends in commercial education in England and Wales for the period 1943–1975. The completed dissertation was accepted for the degree of MEd., at University College, Cardiff, in 1985.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how cloud‐based information systems and services can support emerging and future requirements for sustainability governance of facilities.

The authors present basic elements of cloud‐based sustainability governance platforms, conduct a survey of existing industrial platforms and research works, discuss distinguishable and common characteristics of cloud computing platforms for sustainability governance, and give views on future research.

Cloud computing emerges as a potential candidate for supporting sustainability governance. However, several techniques must be provided in order to support multiple stakeholders, complex analysis and compliance processes.

The number of industrial platforms and research works in the survey is limited, as is information about industrial platforms. Furthermore, industrial platforms are continuously updated, thus some information might be outdated.

There exists no survey for understanding how cloud computing could be used for sustainability governance. The paper not only helps to understand state‐of‐the‐art in using cloud computing for sustainability governance but also discusses main components, stakeholders and requirements for cloud‐based sustainability governance platforms.

The recruitment of undergraduate students within English universities is of vital importance to both the academic success and the financial stability of the organisation. Despite the primacy of the task, there has been a dearth of research looking at related performance and how to ensure that the process is optimised. The purpose of this study was to investigate the degree of variation both within a university and between different universities. The reliance that individual programmes and/or universities place on the Clearing process is key; given its uncertainty, resource demands and timing shortly before students take up their places.

The Nomogramma di Gandy diagrammatical approach utilises readily available data to analyse universities’ performance in recruiting students to different programmes, and the degree to which they each rely of the Clearing process. Inter-university performance was investigated on a whole-student intake basis for a sample of English universities, representative of type and region.

The study found that there were disparate patterns for the many programmes within the pilot university and also disparate patterns between different types of universities across England. Accordingly, universities should internally benchmark their programmes to inform both strategic and tactical decision-making. Similarly, Universities and Colleges Admissions Service benchmarking inter-university patterns could inform the overall sector.

The approach and findings provide lessons for analysing student recruitment which could be critical to universities’ academic and financial health, in an increasingly competitive environment.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

The research reported here attempts to identify the personal skills which are important in the early years of graduate employment. The results are based on responses from over 250 business and law graduates in the UK. When discussing the results a number of practical considerations for employers are highlighted. These include the importance of defining precise skill requirements and their relationship with attitudinal and knowledge‐based competences. The results suggest that some differences in skill requirements exist between employment sectors, and this may have implications for attempts to identify general managerial competences.

This chapter critically engages with ways that teaching excellence has been operationalised in practice. Specific focus is on developing individual teaching excellence, rewarding of success and recognition of teaching excellence and the building of evidence around what works in teaching for the benefits of students. We consider the daily interactions with students that form the basis of frameworks of teaching excellence before arguing that operationalisations of teaching excellence are highly context specific and operate at the level of institutions and the whole higher education sector. We discuss the criteria that underpin teaching excellence awards. This includes governance as well as development frameworks. After considering the complex links between research and teaching and the importance of the disciplinary dimension of teaching excellence, the chapter finally looks at the skills and attributes commonly associated with individual teacher excellence and argues that these are exceptionally difficult to pin down let alone measure. It concludes with some reflections on some of the challenges faced by institutions as they seek to develop the quality of teaching whilst meeting the requirements of the TEF.

Historically, the Further Education (FE) sector has always occupied the hinterland between the policy-heavy landscape that characterises the compulsory education sector and the fiercely independent Higher Education sector. Originally formed to give those who had not fully benefitted from their school education the opportunity to learn new skills and to be given a ‘second chance’, it gradually evolved into something that encompassed a far wider purpose of widening participation in education and also the promotion of social mobility. Because of this, the educational imperative has always featured strongly within the sector.

Recently this has been challenged by a shift to a more market-based approach that stresses neoliberalism, competition between providers and an economic imperative which can conflict with the original aims of the sector.

The sector has also increasingly been used to deliver government priorities, and given the quixotic nature of much of education policy, this has meant that the sector is required to be agile and responsive to a multitude of challenges. The colleges used as the two case studies in this chapter show that while it is important to ensure that the external metrics are met, if funding is available, then it is still possible to balance the educational imperative with the economic imperative with clear leadership and a strict focus on the college’s vision for their role within the sector. This means that the widening participation agenda can still be met, even if numerous barriers are put in the way.

This paper aims to investigate the concept of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) in the field of cross-cultural management.

The related literature has been analysed from various paradigmatic lenses.

As the VUCA world concept originates from business circles, several key articles were published in non-academic journals. Two distinct groups of publications can be identified: consulting literature and academic literature on the VUCA world. While both consulting literature and academic literature about the VUCA world can be associated with functionalism, alternative research paradigms can easily accommodate new studies in connection with the VUCA world: interpretive, critical and postmodern works would fit the features of the VUCA world, along with multi-paradigm studies.

It is advisable to investigate emergent contemporary issues, often labelled VUCA, according to multiple paradigms and to conduct multi-paradigmatic research.

While consulting literature on the VUCA world implicitly assumes functionalist paradigms, academic literature might provide alternative assumptions. Interpretative, critical and postmodern paradigms more accurately address the issues raised by VUCA.