Higher Education and student engagement: implications for a new economic era
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of rising fees and the increasing privatisation of higher education on the expectations of its students. It compares experiences in Canada, Australia and the US with conversations carried out in a UK university in 2012 (after the UK fee rise). Design/methodology/approach – The research was informed by Burns Systemic Action research (2007), following emerging lines of enquiry and responding to resonance in these. It brings together conversations held with new undergraduates, second and third year students and staff tasked with introducing engagement into the curriculum. Findings – Findings indicate that student expectations are heavily influenced by secondary schooling and a target-driven consumer culture but that change has been gradual over a number of years. Alongside wanting “value for money” and “a good social life and a good degree” students are heavily motivated by experience and keen to be challenged. Research limitations/implications – Because of the research approach, the research results may lack generalisability. Practical implications – By comparing banking or transactional approaches to teaching and learning with critical pedagogy this paper hopes to highlight the importance of opening up rather than closing down opportunities for social engagement and experiential learning. Social implications – This paper makes a plea for social engagement that properly responds to the needs of communities resisting market-driven forces that treat students as consumers and expecting more rather than less from them in return. Originality/value – Lecturers are encouraged to rethink the pressures placed upon them by the current economic era and the tensions between competing agendas of employability and engagement.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.029 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.024 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".