During one of the many discussions that I often have with my classes, it became apparent to me that some students had varied views regarding teaching and learning. In fact, what was basically a good teaching practice to me, apparently to many of my students it was not so. At the same time, in the last few years lecturers began expressing their disappointment concerning their students' outcomes and their evident lack of interest as regards their introductory courses. This creates some of the most immediate challenges for lecturers and teacher education designers to question the purpose of their teaching and the ways in which they teach. Indeed, what is the aim of university and college teaching and how should it be carried out? The study explored the conceptions of learning and teaching brought by a group of Cypriot students and their lecturers in their everyday introductory Business courses, carried out in one of the three largest private colleges of Nicosia, Cyprus. Data was gathered through interviews with five lecturers and 12 students in one of the three departments of the college, the School of Business, and analysed using the phenomenographic approach. On the basis of analyses of the data, six conceptions of teaching and six conceptions of learning were identified. It was possible to summarise the conceptions under distinct levels of categories. A three - set - order categorisation of teaching and a two - set - order categorisation of learning were developed. Comparisons were made between the two sets of categories. The findings showed that most participants developed comparatively traditional conceptions of both learning and teaching in a limited range of categories. Relationships between the categories indicated interesting similarities worth exploring further. The overall aim of the research is to offer a more defined understanding of the students' early conceptions of their learning and the lecturers' conceptions of teaching those students.

In the thesis I examine international student decision-making arguing that there is a gap in knowledge about the theoretical frameworks which have been applied to understanding this issue. A comprehensive review of the literature showed that thus far the foremost theory utilised for explaining international student decision-making is the Push-Pull Theory of Migration, a theory which is primarily quantitative. This research innovatively uses a theoretical framework combining three influential capital theories based on a qualitative methodology. Using this theoretical framework, I sought a deeper, and potentially new and different understanding of why international students choose to study abroad and why they select particular host countries – the two questions traditional Push-Pull Theory seeks to answer. The three capital theories used are Human, Cultural and Social Capital. Using these to understand the decision-making of international students begins with the premise that individuals invest in international education in the hope of achieving some aim or reaping some benefit. As these theories originate from two different disciplines, I argue that such an approach provides a more multifaceted perspective for understanding students’ decision-making. Each of these theories, including their strengths and weaknesses, is discussed in detail in the thesis. The context for the study is provided through an examination of the impact of globalisation and neo-liberalism on the political, economic, socio-cultural, and technological trends of recent decades. It also considers the growing internationalisation and marketisation of higher education, including a greater emphasis on and expansion of international student recruitment and mobility. The research notes that individuals are increasingly responsible for their own success in the global knowledge economy. International education is one way in which students can make themselves competitive in the labour market as well as obtain valuable socio-cultural benefits. The research emphasises that higher education is becoming a privately rather than publicly-funded activity in which individual students (and often their families)make the decisions about whether or not to study abroad and where. Host country, source country, and student perspectives are considered. The research focused on international postgraduates originating from five Asian source countries, studying in six disciplines, and enrolled at universities in three different English-speaking host countries. Data on why students decided to study abroad and why they selected their host country was gathered using questionnaires and face-to-face interviews. The student participants in the research were already enrolled in their host universities at the time of data collection thus enabling me to investigate post-enrolment the reasons for their decisions. The combined theoretical framework was used to analyse and categorise the data based on whether students’ answers referred primarily to human, cultural or social capital. The analysis revealed that for each form of capital, the decisions made by these students were based on both the capital they possessed and had access to prior to international study (existing capital) and the capital they hoped to gain from going abroad (potential capital). Existing and potential capital were broken down further into relevant themes and sub-themes. The analyses also showed that human capital factors were most influential, followed by cultural capital and then social capital factors. In addition there was significant overlap among the forms of capital. Finally, the implications and limitations of the research are considered along with recommendations for further research.

The core of this thesis is to investigate the perceptions of teachers in Further Education (FE) when dealing with the continuous change caused by the expansion of information and learning technology (ILT). This thesis also identifies the potential links between the increase in the range and availability of learning technology and the development of self- directed and student-centred learning. It explores the perceptions of practicing teachers with reference to their personal development and if such development indicates compliance with adult learning theory. It also analysis the external pressures placed on FE colleges and their teaching staff due to the development of ILT and the related governmental policy. The thesis regards teachers in the FE sector as a unique group of adult learners with a wide range of experience, qualifications and entry routes into the profession. It investigates a sample of teachers using questionnaires and focus groups analysing their perceptions of ILT, preferred learning styles, identified needs and self evaluation techniques and analysis any correlation between these factors and the biographical parameters obtained from the questionnaire responses. An aspect of the investigation was to analyse how teachers became proficient in the use of ILT, routes staff use to obtain the skills and knowledge required and if the aspects of adult learning theory are being applied. A related aspect of this research is the investigation of whether the perceptions of teacher of their personal development experiences related to ILT indicate if an FE college is or can become a “learning organisation” and if such a concept is valid for the FE sector.

Set in the context of a Post-92 university college Education Studies department, this thesis investigates how new undergraduates might be supported in the transition to Higher Education. It describes an intervention informed by research into Academic Literacies that was undertaken in a first year, first semester module. The intervention aimed to scaffold participation in academic practice, and in particular academic literacy practice, in collaborative workshops within the context of the module content. The methodological approach combines action research with aspects of ethnography to produce ‘ethnographic action research’. Drawing on the work of Lave & Wenger, students working in groups are conceptualised as academic student communities of practice, and audio recordings of students engaged in collaborative activities provide evidence of their lived experience of the module in three domains: what they do; what they know; and how they position themselves in relation to academic practice. The findings show how talk about practice, within the context of participation in practice, is instrumental to change in all three domains: the negotiation of distinctly ‘academic’ ways of working in groups; the construction of meaning in the relationship between what is known about academic practice and what is done; and, the construction of the self as academic. I conclude that Higher Education pedagogical arrangements need to build communities that talk about practice and consider how such an approach responds to future challenges.

E-Learning perhaps is the exciting topic related to higher education in the current decade. Large numbers of researchers devote their enthusiasm to this area. The early days of E-Learning were product-driven, and the dialogue about E-Learning took place primarily among vendors who were heavily funded by investment capital. Most of the E-Learning vendors promoted their technology, but less attention was paid to the issues surrounding implementation or to the usage of E-Learning by the end users. However, the behaviour of end users or of the organizations which had introduced E-Learning should be the main concern of an innovation in the management process. Included in an entire E-Learning development strategy should be a detailed analysis and action plan to obtain a comprehensive overview of three aspects of innovation processes: organizational, technological, and products/services. A successful E-Learning launch should also pay close consideration to all of the interactions during the triple innovation process, a proposal which will be addressed in this research. Given the multiple objectives of investigating the processes of E-Learning innovation, the interaction between different aspects of innovation and the issues which influence those processes, a qualitative case study approach is appropriate for establishing empirical evidence and describing the phenomenon of the E-Learning innovation process in higher education. The fieldwork started in March 2004 and finished in August 2008. It comprised one pilot study at National Chung Cheng University Taiwan, and the main research context at the University of Nottingham. The data collected were used to analyse and conceptualise the E-Learning innovation process with three sub-processes, outlined in detail in a following subsection: research methodology and design. This research contributes to the understanding of E-Learning innovation processes by providing triple aspects of organizational, technological and service innovation individually, and maps the E-Learning innovation processes in its different aspects. The relationships and interactions in the E-Learning innovation process within organizational, technological and service innovation are conceptualized in order to explain their complexity, and they also summarized the main interaction categories for different interactions. The series of detailed analyses indicates that organizational, technological and service innovations are inseparable and show a strong link with one another. Moreover, a framework of simplified triple E-Learning innovation with triple interactions is proposed.

This longitudinal study explores how a Western university setting affects Chinese international students’ academic reading in terms of their strategy use during their master’s study. In order to explore the multifaceted nature of academic reading, reading strategies in this study are categorised into three types: textbase strategies (TBS); situation model construction strategies (SMS); and comprehension monitoring strategies (CMS). Furthermore, the study applies the concepts of trait and state to distinguish two types of strategy status: Chinese students’ general perception of what they normally do in their coursework reading (trait strategy use), and what they actually do in their on-line reading (state strategy use). Mixed methods were employed in data collection, which was carried out twice among the same participants in one academic year. The results of the questionnaires indicate that significant changes occurred in trait strategy use over time, in particular, in trait situation model construction strategies. Think-aloud was used to examine their cognitive processing in a task-provoked situation. Protocol analysis shows that there were no significant changes in their state strategy use between Time1 and Time2. Case studies and syntactic parsing analysis show that their TBS-oriented processing was mainly triggered by their low competence in English language decoding. In addition, data analysis of focus groups and interviews suggests that their choice of TBS was closely related to the socialisation they had in China. Socio-cultural factors seemed to have a strong impact on what strategies they used, and also on the frequency with which they used them. The unbalanced development between trait and state strategy use suggests that Chinese international students’ academic reading is dynamic and multidimensional. Findings in this study offer us insightful information about the transition in Chinese international students’ reading from ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn’, and also about the scaffolding that this population needs in master’s study in the UK.

This PhD thesis explores the determinants and impact of UniversityIndustry (U-I) knowledge transfer. It focuses on the UK as well as a number of European regions and aims at filling several gaps in the literature. Firstly, I examine the role of scientific (i.e. university) and market (i.e. customers, competitors, suppliers) knowledge for patent inventors working inside firms. I use data from an original survey of industry inventors combined with patent data from the European Patent Office and I employ an econometric strategy rarely applied at inventor’s level (i.e. productivity approach). My finding is that the amount and quality of patents invented increase when inventors draw their knowledge jointly from a wide set of knowledge sources, rather than from only one of these. Secondly, I investigate the impact of U-I research collaborations on UK firms’ R&D activities. The data consists of a set of publicly funded U-I partnerships combined with firm-level data available from the UK Office for National Statistics. I combine propensity score matching with OLS regression to select an ad-hoc control group and obtain a reliable estimate of the impact of U-I collaboration on firms. My finding is that treated firms’ R&D expenditure and share of R&D employment both increase after participation to U-I partnerships. Thirdly, I explore the role of research quality as a determinant of UK university departments’ engagement in U-I collaboration. I use data on publicly funded U-I collaboration combined with data on UK universities and I employ OLS regression. My finding is that academic quality displays a mixture of negative and positive relationship with the volume of private funding for U-I collaboration, and that this is interdependent with the level of academia’s past experience in U-I collaboration. Together, these chapters make important contributions to a vast but still puzzled literature on U-I knowledge transfer activities.

This thesis has sought to examine how and why mathematics lecturers in Saudi Arabian universities use software for teaching. It is a large-scale, mixed methods study within a post positivist tradition, utilising data collected from interviews and a questionnaire. Eighteen lecturers from two mathematics departments at two major universities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) were interviewed individually in their offices. Further, 151 lecturers responded to the questionnaire distributed to lecturers of Mathematics and Statistics at eight long-established state universities in KSA. This study explains why lecturers of mathematics at universities use or do not use ICT for teaching and, in so doing, contributes to an under-researched area of study. It raises questions as to how users and non-users of software regard the nature of teaching and learning of mathematics at universities and the contribution of ICT in university-level mathematics. Previous research on the use of software by mathematics teachers has identified a range of factors affecting take up and use of ICT, including access to ICT resources, knowledge of how to integrate technology into mathematics teaching, and beliefs about the role of technology in learning and teaching and assessing mathematics (e.g. an overreliance on technology, use of technology as a black box, use of calculators in examinations). However, there remains ongoing debate about the balance of internal and external factors in the take up of ICT and whether factors related to easy access to software are more (or less) influential than teachers’ beliefs. The findings of this study revealed that identification with the branch of mathematics was a key factor in determining the lecturers who are likely to be users of software in teaching. In particular, it was found that statisticians and computational mathematicians were more likely to be users of software because they were teaching courses which require the use of software. The findings suggested that despite all of the encouraging conditions, contextual and internal barriers — such as a curriculum with heavy and fixed content; software which was not assessed in many cases; lack of cooperation between lecturers to produce curricula which included the use of software; and doubts about the value of software — were at work here. This study has a special interest in Valsiner’s Zone Theory as a lens to study the take up of ICT. In particular, the Zone Theory demystifies why the take up of mathematical software by the mathematics lecturers was patchy despite the good access to ICT resources and the high potential of the use of software in mathematics teaching. From the Zone Theory’s perspective, lecturers worked within a particularly broad zone of free movement but a weak zone of promoted action so that lecturers’ activity was rarely ‘canalised’ into using mathematical software. The Zone Theory puts emphasis on agency-structure dualism, focusing on the actions carried out by individual lecturers as ‘agents’ in the context of constraining and enabling ‘structures’ when making a decision on whether software should be used in teaching. This thesis has reaffirmed the call for more theoretical and empirical research on the issue of the integration of mathematical software in the teaching and learning of mathematics in higher education.

This thesis examines the employment conditions for clerical and administrative staff within the British Higher Education Sector. For this analysis a national questionnaire was distributed and 747 responses were returned and analysed. In order to further enrich the qualitative research data, 30 interviews were also conducted, mainly with clerical and secretarial staff but also with management staff who had progressed from clerical grades. The main focus of the research was to examine inequalities within the higher education sector that impinge particularly on the clerical and administrative workforce. The thesis develops an analytic framework based on dual systems theory to show how clerical occupations have developed into highly segregated female-dominated occupations. The dual influences of capitalism and patriarchy in the development of female disadvantage is illustrated in the historical sections of the thesis. Inequality regimes which operate within hierarchical organisations such as universities are then used to explain how these class and gender-based disadvantages are replicated and reinforced through organisational structures and processes. The conclusions drawn by the thesis demonstrate that class and gender discrimination is entrenched within the British Higher Education system. This institutionalised discrimination continues to work to the disadvantage of women in all occupational groups across the sector. However, clerical and administrative staff, as a predominately female. 2 group of workers, are particularly vulnerable to inequalities and lack of opportunities, both because of their gender and also their class position within the organisational hierarchy.

This thesis is located within the discipline of history, and centres around the experiences of women in US and British universities. Higher education in both the US and the UK, as throughout the world, has historically been male-led and male-controlled. This male hegemony of higher education continues to the present, as evidenced by the low percentage of women in the upper echelons of academia (for example, professors). Women in the US and the UK have been challenging this male hegemony since their admittance to higher education institutions in the nineteenth century. They faced fierce opposition in their efforts to open higher education to women. This opposition was later echoed in the resistance to twentieth-century feminists' efforts to found women's studies programmes. The male hegemony of higher education is evident in the case histories of the experiences of women at Appalachian State University (ASU) and the University of Gloucestershire (UG) in the latter part of the twentieth century. ASU and UG, although located in different countries, have similarities which make a comparison interesting. The male hegemony of the institutions, and women's challenges to it, is especially illustrated when analysing three areas: residence hall life (living), staff issues (working), and the women's studies programmes (teaching and learning). Women students at both institutions experienced, and successfully challenged, strict residence rules through the 1960s. National influences, such as the change in the age of majority, and pressure from the students themselves brought a loosening of these rules in the 1970s and 1980s. The conservative nature of the institutions also influenced the experience of women academic staff. Institutional management was not proactive regarding women's issues, and there is strong evidence of a `glass ceiling' at both institutions. The male hegemony of the institutions was also illustrated in the struggle to found and maintain women's studies programmes.