As GenAI technologies become more pervasive in higher education (HE), scholars call for guidance on AI governance. To meet this need, a Delphi technique and collective writing was used in gathering expert perspectives from across 22 countries/locations and six continents. This resulted in the development of a HE GenAI policy/guidelines framework with eight core areas: (1) academic integrity, (2) ethical use and responsible use, (3) privacy and protection, (4) equitable access, (5) GenAI literacy, (6) integration strategy, (7) human oversight and accountability, and (8) institutional support and infrastructure. In addition, a six-part framework was developed to ensure that policies remain current and relevant: (1) creating a dedicated GenAI Committee, (2) conducting regularly scheduled policy reviews, (3) providing ongoing professional development and support, (4) communicating with all stakeholders, (5) evaluating the effectiveness and impact of GenAI, and 6) monitoring external developments. By providing a robust, eight-part framework for policy and guidelines, alongside a six-part mechanism for continued review, this study offers faculty, students, administrators, educational leaders, policymakers, and funders a responsible, adaptable, and consensus-driven blueprint for navigating the integration of GenAI in HE, ensuring that technological innovation serves pedagogical excellence.

Research on immersive virtual reality's (VR) impact on K-12 education, particularly experiential learning, has increased. However, there is a paucity of research providing insight into teacher and student perspectives on integrating virtually situated learning experiences (VSLE) into curricula and classrooms. This article reports on the pedagogical and practical benefits and challenges of using an immersive VSLE to support experiential learning across three K-12 schools. Focus groups with teachers and students revealed pedagogical benefits but also constraints related to classroom environments, teacher demands, and the VSLE's scale and interactivity. The findings were synthesized into an expanded conceptualisation of Situated Experiential Education Environments, incorporating nuanced pedagogical and practical considerations raised by participants.

This article presents findings from a longitudinal case study of academic audit as enacted at a typical New Zealand university between 1994 and 2019. Academic audit is a higher education quality assurance methodology applied to New Zealand universities. The longitudinal study yielded findings that could not have been detected in a single, five-year audit cycle, in particular, that very similar recommendations were given more than once. Three sets of recurrent recommendations were studied in detail: closing the student feedback loop; monitoring PhD students' progress and 'quality assurance infrastructure and leadership'. The issues emerging from these three topics are 'audit dysfunctions', some of which are attributable to the institution and some of which belong to the external quality assurance agency. The audit dysfunctions are intended as a heuristic for improving the rigour and effectiveness of higher education quality assurance.

AbstractSkills challenges for the future embody major challenges for a national system of education. One is the ability of skills-development mechanisms to scale well beyond the limits of the existing models while also reducing dramatically the associated costs of development and operation for providers, and the costs of participation and achievement demonstration for learners. A second is that of being responsive to a rapidly changing environment, evolving existing structures to meet new needs. This chapter explores the New Zealand context for these challenges. A future-facing model, responding to these challenges and using inspiration from the New Zealand Māori concept of ‘Ako’, is presented. Described as ‘microlearning’, this model is proposed as an alternative for Future Skills development that avoids the pitfalls of credentialised approaches. The potential for microlearning for Future Skills development in regulated professionals is suggested as a starting point for initial exploration of this new model.

Originally published in 2012, over an 18-month period four New Zealand educational institutions—a university, a private tertiary enterprise, a wānanga, and an institute of technology/polytechnic— have engaged in a process of change influenced by technology. Their e-learning capability was benchmarked using the E-Learning Maturity Model, and this information was used to stimulate change activities. The resulting case studies, discussed in this paper, illustrate the issues that face tertiary organisations and leaders engaging with the opportunities and challenges of e-learning. Five factors have been identified as significant influences on the ability of organisations to change in response to technology in the current political and educational landscape of the New Zealand tertiary sector.

The virtual university is a social construct that is placed very firmly within a very real place in political, legal and economic ways that need to be carefully and thoughtfully incorporated into the quality systems used to improve the university and as importantly, communicate key qualities to external audiences and stakeholders. This chapter provides a conceptual model and a high-level reference point for leaders reflecting on the quality framework of the virtual university and the establishment of strong organizational foundations for improvement activities through a sense-making approach driven by powerful conversations with stakeholders.

Internationalisation has been a strategic vehicle to transform higher education and become a prominent trend in universities across the world in the past decades. Internationalisation of higher education is drawing growing attention from the broader community outside the education sector, especially as its rationales, operations and impacts more closely align with social, cultural, economic and political interests. It is increasingly subject to public policy turbulences related to migration, workforce, post-study work rights and economics. In particular, international education has been growingly used as a mechanism to address skills shortage and support nation-building in some study destination countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Germany and the international education and migration nexus or ‘edugration’ trend (Brunner, 2023) becomes more visible. Internationalisation of higher education has been affected by the development of digital technologies and both local and global online e-learning markets, while at the same time encountering heightened insecurity and vulnerability to pandemic, financial, geo-political crises and natural disasters. In ‘catching-up’ countries in internationalisation of higher education such as Turkey and Poland, political instability, economic importance, socio-cultural norms and historical legacies, and the country’s position as a periphery are seen as national barriers to facilitating international education (Bulut Sahin & Brooks, 2023). These emerging challenges have led to changes and variations in policy frameworks, institutional operations and individual practices in internationalisation of higher education. These issues have significant implications for the quality, recovery, sustainability, and ethical development of international education. The articles in this Special Issue probe into the re-conceptualisation of international education in diverse ways and to varied extents. However, they underscore a critical need to shed a more humanistic view on internationalisation of higher education. International education should, in essence, be centred around enriching human beings. It is therefore crucial to strive towards humanisation of international education. Humanisation of international education can take place in various forms. First, humanisation of international education underscores the need for the human values of international education to be more explicitly brought to the fore. Scholars have argued for the critical need to move beyond the discourse framing the value of international students predominantly in economic terms and international education as commercialisation, strongly influenced by reputational status and resourcing (Lomer et al., 2023), to acknowledge international students as human beings with potential to contribute to transnational education, culture, society, local communities and politics (Rizvi, 2020; Soong & Maheepalaa, 2023; Tran, 2020). Second, humanising international education can be realised through recognising and validating diverse perspectives, experiences, knowledges and ways of building knowledges that

The single system model of an LMS, reflecting a relatively passive use of digital technologies, is increasingly out of step in the rapidly evolving global higher education environment. This proposes a model that moves from a single systems conception of the LMS to one informed by concepts of learning ecosystems and platforms. We define the LMS and the scope of its functions in order to frame how it might evolve in the future. A conception of the LMS as a learning platform is presented drawing on the successful models used by large Internet companies to provide an infrastructure designed to support change through innovation at the boundary while also ensuring it remains manageable at its core and operates in a way that is aligned to the strategic objectives of the university.

It has been said for years that, in the near future the Learning Management System (LMS) will become a thing of the past. Some suggest this should already be the case, but it has not been possible to break our institutional dependence on this technology. In the meantime, institutions have developed sophisticated networks of tools, largely built off the back of LTIs and xAPIs to seamlessly make the LMS a pervasive convenor of learning. These tools include media streaming, virtual classrooms, collaboration tools, plagiarism checking, ePortfolio, voice interaction, peer-review/learning, brainstorming, H5Ps and the list goes on. All that is left for the traditional LMS to do is to mediate these tools, house and collate assessment and scaffold the different learning scenarios. Admittedly it also helps the institution link to other organizational tools such as student management and curriculum management systems. This chapter looks at the future implications and examines a range of views from technology enhanced learning professionals from across the sector. The views being canvased may provide institutions with a framework to help them consider their future directions and how the evolving technology landscape may see newer ways of using emerging technologies to better support or student cohorts.

Mixed reality technologies, including virtual and augmented reality, and also referred to as extended reality, have been in continuous development for nearly 60 years. The current generation of technologies is widely applied in diverse contexts including education. Although most educational applications are currently limited in their pedagogical framing, being dominated by content experiences, mixed realities have a number of emerging, emergent, and emerged benefits able to support a virtual university which are reviewed in this chapter. Three themes are identified: the value that these technologies play in bringing information into the environment of the learner; the ability to change the learner’s perceptions; and the implications for the virtual university as an evolving organization able to take new forms through the application of mixed reality technologies. A conceptual framework arising from the review is presented to provide a classification system for the diverse forms of new and emerging mixed reality.

This chapter explores how Vietnamese and local doctoral students developed their perceptions of plagiarism while pursuing their PhD at a New Zealand university, drawing on Marginson's theory of international student self-formation, especially his notions of agency and identity construction. Doctoral students' perceptions of plagiarism were not only impacted by university practices but developed through processes of self-directed learning and identity formation. Student agency was enacted through deliberate goal-setting, taking charge of their own learning, and development of personal voice in writing. The students actively developed their understanding of plagiarism to create their future aspirational selves. Application of Marginson's theoretical framework reveals doctoral students as agentic beings and offers a contrasting perspective to deficit models of international students. Implications for practice include supporting doctoral students' scholarly identity development through fostering their agency.

Augmented or mediated reality tools superimpose or composite virtual objects into the real world, supplementing reality rather than replacing it. The educational benefits include assisting learners appreciating a real-world experience more fully and developing independent thinking, creativity, and critical analysis. The intelligence amplification potential of this technology has been recognized for many years, and the development of low-cost augmented reality hardware integrated into mobile devices now means that educational implementations are plausible and can be practically implemented in a wide range of contexts. This chapter surveys the conceptualization of augmented reality and provides a detailed review of its educational applications, analyzing the underlying theoretical foundations that describe the learning and cognitive impact of its use as well as the practical benefits for learners and educators.

Abstract New Zealand’s university system is barely 150 years old and in that time has experienced significant growth and change, sharing challenges with universities worldwide in addressing social, cultural, economic, technological, and educational change. The system operates in a highly neoliberal policy space with an emphasis on direct economic impact, shaped strongly by global rankings and their influence on the attractiveness of universities to international students and their associated export earnings. A major issue facing the country is the systematic inequality experienced by indigenous Māori and by Pacific Island communities and this is being addressed through policies mandating performance targets on educational institutions. Associated with this are ongoing issues in building a domestic academic workforce, particularly in the Māori academic community, in the face of research performance systems that focus on international impact. The future state of the system is unclear. This chapter considers a range of strategies for leaders.

Despite increasing scholarly interest in tertiary student perceptions of plagiarism, very little is known about those held by postgraduate (PG) students, although differences between undergraduate (UG) and PG students relate to both their characteristics and the demands of their studies. Furthermore, there is a dearth of research within the context of international education, where managing plagiarism is seen as a major challenge. This paper reports on a recent online survey with 207 Vietnamese ( n = 72) and local ( n = 135) PG students at a New Zealand university regarding their perceptions of plagiarism. The findings showed significant differences both between and within the two groups. Perception variations arose from a range of influences and prior experiences, not just the culture in which the students were initially educated. Differences related to participants’ age, gender, academic levels, disciplines, and teaching experience. This study’s findings contribute knowledge about under-researched PG students and problematize prevalent stereotypes of international students regarding plagiarism. They generate implications for higher education institutions to accommodate international and domestic PG student needs in ways that respect their diversities in detail as individuals, not as members of a homogeneous group. Further qualitative research to explore PG student perceptions in greater depth is recommended.

The changes that Powell envisaged were changes to educational practice. Reflecting on the journal’s first three decades of publication in HERD’s 30th anniversary Special Issue, editors Barbara Grant and Bruce Macfarlane (2012, p. 2) concluded that HERD had indeed maintained its focus on ‘work that seeks change in practice’. At the same time, they noted a growing curiosity and sophistication in our thinking about change, ‘(beyond ‘technique’ for example)’ (p. 2) towards an appreciation of the complex and often unpredictable nature of change within the sector. They looked forward to a deeper and broader engagement with new methodologies and theoretical frameworks that would enable us to ask different kinds of questions in our pursuit of change. In the decade that has passed since that Special Issue, the need for new questions and new ways of thinking has never been greater, as the sector has faced a raft of new challenges, most recently, of course, the ongoing impact of the global pandemic. For HERD’s 40th anniversary Special Issue, we invited authors to engage with the history of higher education research as represented by 40 years of HERD publications, particularly over the past decade. In doing so, we hoped to mark the various watershed moments that have impacted on higher education and reflect critically on the complexity, change and ambiguity that have challenged, and continue to challenge, the sector. A focus on change, and the associated shifts in the scale of complexity of academic work are key themes in all of the papers in this Special Issue. The challenge this represents to individual academics leads our first author, Shelda Debowski to observe “it isn’t easy being an academic” (Debowski, 2022, p.x). Debowski’s contribution critically examines what it means to be an academic today and how this has changed, as evidenced by publications in HERD since 1982. There is an acknowledgment of an escalating pre-occupation with ‘academic performance’ despite increased workload, the casualisation of the academic workforce, uncertainty about the future, and the fallout of the pandemic. Debowski notes that it is no longer enough for an early career academic to establish their academic identity; they also need to create a narrative about the impact of their teaching and research. Academics need to provide evidence of their effective performance often through the use of institutional instruments and metrics, including teaching evaluations that must be regarded as a flawed process. Further, Debowski suggests that a ‘successful academic’ now needs to be

This chapter explores divergent views about plagiarism within the context of the internationalization of higher education and reports on a recent investigation of perceptions of plagiarism among Vietnamese and local doctoral students at a New Zealand university. Findings revealed that all the doctoral participants possessed substantial understanding of plagiarism, and their professional experiences as lecturers and tutors were a significant influence on their perspectives. While considering intentional plagiarism as a moral issue, a form of academic cheating, and a scholarly offence, they viewed unintentional plagiarism as a developmental and intercultural issue. Compared to their Vietnamese peers, New Zealand doctoral students had more academic publication experience and showed deeper awareness of scholarly impacts of plagiarism. The chapter concludes with recommendations that doctoral supervisors engage with individual students to learn about each one's background, understandings, and needs, so that they can better support doctoral students' apprenticeship into the scholarly community.

Virtual reality technology has made significant advances and is now widely recognised for its potential to provide fully immersive experiences that have relevance to many aspects of life, including education. This paper explores the effectiveness of VR technology for situated experiential education by adopting a user experience (UX) theoretical framing of an example application in tourism education. The trial of a VR-based experiential education tool followed by semi-structured interviews revealed many positive user perspectives that lend strong support for the technology’s use for experiential education, however, several negative experiences were also identified, included the debilitating impact of motion sickness. The UX framework contributes a deeper analysis of the positive and negative experiences by applying the three UX facets, beyond instrumental facet, emotion & affect facet, and the experiential facet, which in combination serve to not only identify key areas requiring improvement but also assists in the prioritisation process. While the exploratory findings promote further engagement with VR to foster experiential education more research is required to locate VR’s broader pedagogical place in tertiary education.

Appears in: EDULEARN21 Proceedings Publication year: 2021Pages: 6359-6365ISBN: 978-84-09-31267-2ISSN: 2340-1117doi: 10.21125/edulearn.2021.1289Conference name: 13th International Conference on Education and New Learning TechnologiesDates: 5-6 July, 2021Location: Online Conference