Widening participation in higher education: the role of professional and social class identities and commitments

Since the neoliberal reforms to British education in the 1980s, education debates have been saturated with claims to the efficacy of the market as a mechanism for improving the content and delivery of state education. In recent decades with the expansion and ‘massification’ of higher education, widening participation (WP) has acquired an increasingly important role in redressing the under-representation of certain social groups in universities. Taken together, these trends neatly capture the twin goals of New Labour’s programme for education reform: economic competitiveness and social justice. But how do WP professionals negotiate competing demands of social equity and economic incentive? In this paper we explore how the hegemony of neoliberal discourse – of which the student as consumer is possibly the most pervasive – can be usefully disentangled from socially progressive, professional discourses exemplified through the speech and actions of WP practitioners and managers working in British higher education institutions.     

Unauthorised e-book downloading of students in higher education

This study reveals students’ unauthorised downloading of e-books in higher education. In-person surveys were administered at four university campuses in Taiwan. The 422 valid samples were made up of both undergraduate and graduate students. Students in the more legitimate segment illegally downloaded 0.26 e-books per month on average. Shockingly, students in the less legitimate segment illegally downloaded 18.50 e-books per month on average. Respondents in the less legitimate segment would definitely search for unauthorised e-books if they could not locate those in digital libraries, and they would use software to download. This study examined unauthorised downloading of e-books by students in higher education in hopes of bringing much needed attention to this area. The contributions from this study are not merely to fill a gap in the literature, but to provide a baseline for further research.     

External peer review of assessment: an effective approach to verifying standards?

There is growing international concern to regulate and assure standards in higher education. External peer review of assessment, often called external examining, is a well-established approach to assuring standards. Australian higher education is one of several systems without a history of external examining for undergraduate programmes that is currently considering the approach. What can entrants to external examining at that level learn from the UK higher education system's long history of external examining? To that end, this paper reports on a mixed methods research project designed to investigate current practices in how academic standards are conceived, constructed and applied by external examiners and debates the implications of the findings for the development of external examining in other countries. The findings suggest that the potential of experienced peers in a subject discipline to provide the assurance of standards is limited. It concludes by presenting various possible enhancements that might be considered.     

The Licensing Lifecycle: From Negotiation to Compliance

The license negotiated at the beginning of the electronic resources lifecycle impacts access to the resource throughout the life of the contract. To simplify the negotiating process, the Texas A&M University (TAMU) Libraries developed a licensing checklist. In order to make completed licenses accessible to all library personnel, the TAMU Libraries use the electronic resources management system Centralized Online Resources and Licensing (CORAL) to store license documents and terms. This presentation reviewed the TAMU Libraries’ licensing process, the creation and evolution of the licensing checklist, and the suitability of CORAL to share license details. The presenters also recounted several examples of difficult negotiations and license violations.