Activity theory (AT) is a powerful tool for investigating "artefacts in use", ie, the ways technologies interrelate with their local context. AT reveals the interfaces between e-learning at the macro- (strategy, policy, "campus-wide" solutions) and the micro-organisational levels (everyday working practice, iterative change, individual…

The American Association of School Administrators (AASA) invited the 2007 state winners to gather in Denver, Colorado, for three days of intensive dialogue about the challenges facing today's superintendents. As a result of the panels and small group discussions that followed, superintendents identified and detailed in this paper five avenues for…

Following a landmark organisational change event within the University of Western Sydney, when the university ceased operating as a federation of four distinct, inter-related elements and merged to become a single entity, four foundation College Managers made a strategic decision to form an alliance. This alliance significantly enhanced the…

This seventh edition of "Key Data on Education in Europe" retains its main special feature which is the combination of statistical data and qualitative information to describe the organisation and functioning of education systems in Europe. The present 2009 edition maintains the subject-based structure defined by the previous one but…

Student success was the motivation for evolving an individual project-based course into a project-centric curriculum. A one semester project was first extended across a sequence of three interrelated courses tied together through their focus on the success of small team projects that spanned those courses. This sequence was then targeted as the…

The conference papers examine higher education reforms in the countries of Eastern and Central Europe from several research perspectives: political, economic, pedagogical, and sociological. Papers are organized in three sections: Higher Education Policies and Institutional Change; Central European Higher Education in Transition; and Higher…

These two case studies were commissioned by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) as part of its Western Policy Exchange (WPE) Project, in an effort to understand the dynamics and perceived consequences of a "state roundtable" approach to fostering partnerships in education in order to advance systemic change and…

The Western Policy Exchange Project is designed to help states assess the implications of environmental changes on their own higher education system. In roundtables and policy workshops, six Western states--Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota, Arizona, and Washington--looked for evidence of systemic change and proposed the following five…

This report contends that current university-based research and development activities investigating successful secondary schools provide an exceptional mechanism for coordinating all three aspects of assessing successful schools: legal compliance, student performance, and quality of school life. A typology of schools is proposed to account for…

One of the major tenets of Total Quality Management (TQM) is that organizations need to adopt a strong customer focus. At El Camino College (ECC) in Torrance, California, a matrix was developed to identify and describe ECC's direct and indirect internal and external customers. ECC then applied Quality Function Deployment (QFD), a strategic tool…

This document presents information on how the Western states are responding to some of the major policy issues facing U.S. higher education today and on the strategies they have used to implement change. The study, prepared by the Western Policy Exchange Project, defines today's higher education environment as characterized by dynamic global,…

A needs sensing project was conducted to identify the general needs of the field of career and technical education (CTE), dissemination activities, and major forces in the environment judged likely to influence education in the foreseeable future. The need sensing took place with networks developed in regions assigned to the five primary partner…