Learning outcomes have become an integral part of the global trend in higher education reform and are employed in three interconnected areas: (1) quality assurance, (2) teaching and learning, and (3) transfer credit. The article touches briefly on the first two areas, but focuses discussion on employing learning outcomes in transfer credit. Using…

This study examines how international education programs in British Columbia have been discursively framed by government and media sources. Over the past two decades, international education programs have expanded in number and scale in the province, a phenomenon that has been interpreted by some education researchers and media sources as…

Business organizations adopt innovation with the objective of meeting competition and improving their business performance; education organizations, likewise, operate in a competitive environment, are evaluated by stakeholders, and adopt innovation. The research presented here links these two sectors; its objective was to characterize the process…

The first multi-indicator ranking of world universities, "Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)", was published by the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in June 2003. Although the initial purpose of ARWU was to find the global standing of top Chinese universities, it has been attracting world-wide…

The diversity in educational contexts found in India should be viewed as a valuable feature and as a unique challenge. In an era of greater globalization and educational standardization, of policy borrowing and of international comparisons of achievement, there is a high demand and need to respect context and to appreciate how countries with…

Mobile phone service is increasing among low income populations; however, with over 1 billion mobile service users worldwide, many people still lack banking services. Banks do not reach out to the poor because of the high operational costs involved. Scholars and industry practitioners have indicated that mobile phones could be an alternative…

The purposes of this paper were to undertake a comparative analysis of policy shifts in England and the United States of America relating to school type diversification and corporatization, and the implications for educational leader preparation programs. Whilst the school delivery landscape seems to be one of turbulence, over the last four…

Although it has revealed the material conditions under which language education programmes are implemented worldwide, research on neoliberalism and language commodification has not yet adequately centred pedagogy. Thus, processes commodifying 'objects' other than language as product go unnoticed in educational settings. Drawing on a four-year…

The year 1989 marked the official end of communist rule in Poland and the replacement of "Gosplan" by new instruments for liberal-democratic governance. In terms of the economy this heralded a departure from Gosplan's five-year planning cycles, performance targets and the "propaganda of success." Paradoxically, however, 27…

Since 2009, the Swedish Government uses an "audit" agency--the Swedish Schools Inspectorate--to monitor and assess the accuracy with which teachers grade student responses on national tests. This study explores the introduction and subsequent establishment of the Inspectorate's regrading programme as an example of political management of…

This paper critically analyses key educational policy documents produced by the World Bank mainly from the mid-1980s to 2010 with regard to implementing major educational projects in Nepal. Using critical policy sociology as a methodological tool, the paper explores how a small Himalayan nation with per capita income of about US$730 (2014) plunged…

Higher education accountability is a field characterized by complexity. Prior frameworks grounded in psychometrics, economics, and history fall short in explaining the persistence and composition of its complexity. This article employs organizational theory to identify the multiple conflicting approaches of higher education accountability and…

This article builds on the established notion that schools are hierarchised through policy, accruing different amounts and types of symbolic capital, by examining how this is reflected in the habitus of the leaders of new, privileged school types. The article uses Bourdieu's concept of hysteresis, or a dislocation between the habitus which…

This article reports the findings of a sociolinguistic ethnographic inquiry into the constructions of internal rural-to-urban migrant students by one urban public school in China, and how these students positioned themselves to these constructions against the background of the school's neoliberal transformation. This inquiry finds that, due to the…

Unbundling is the process through which products previously sold together are separated into their constituent parts. In higher education, this dynamic has been driven primarily by financial motivations, and spearheaded by the for-profit sector, but also has pedagogical motivations through its emphasis on personalisation and employability. This…