The relationship of leadership roles to the improvement of the student experience: international perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the ways in which key academic roles operate in higher education, bridging space, a ‘third space’ (Whitchurch, 2008) between the academic and the administrative, that frames the activities of academic staff engaging in projects that improve the student experience. We argue that such roles are the focus for implementing and designing change management projects that can promote innovation in pedagogic practice. Data was gathered through undertaking 21 interviews both in the UK and overseas with interviewees from Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. The data provides insights into the ways in which academic staff acting in academic leadership roles, both here and overseas, engage in such projects. The paper draws from a chapter in the authors’ recently published book, Understanding and Improving the Student Experience in Higher Education: navigating the third space. Through the voices of practitioners in UK and international settings, the importance of understanding the role of third space professionals and the importance of leadership is brought to the fore. The paper considers the ways in which third space professionals act as educational leaders from the perspective of their agency, the fluid spaces that they operate within, their creativity and the metrics discourse.
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 | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".