There is increasing interest in the role academic institutions can play as catalysts of change within the territories in which they are located, by contributing proactively to shaping socio-economic development processes. This role for universities takes us beyond the typical focus on knowledge transfer activities or broad economic impacts. It…

Distance education in a professional higher school is of particular importance in terms of fundamental changes in modern educational institutions. This form of training together with the expansion of information technologies can effectively solve the problem of training students and life-long learning. Distance education is able to solve the…

Academic practice is scrutinized and regulated with such "Corporate speak" terms as "performance indicators," "benchmarking," "service providers" and "clients." As part of a field where ideological shifts continue to apply marketized frames of reference as neoliberalism tightens its grip, new terms…

"Who cares?" and "Why do I need to know this?" are not just tired student mantras to be brushed aside by frustrated teachers. They are the questions about significance that lie at the heart of their work. At a time of both international economic recession and unprecedented global competition, educators and policy-makers too…

In 2008, the Digital Humanities Observatory was charged with creating an all-island gateway to Irish digital collections and resources. A key factor in the achievement of this goal was the development of the web application, "DHO: Discovery." This chapter will describe what "DHO: Discovery" was intended to be and to what extent…

The article discusses the nature of humanistic knowledge. Analyzing the relation between aesthetic judgment, literacy and knowledge as defined by the French seventeenth-century Jansenist school of Port-Royal, the article argues that Port-Royal's interpretation of the enthymeme can be used to define the cognitive basis of aesthetic judgments in the…

This article begins by acknowledging the general worry that scholarship in the humanities lacks the rigor and objectivity of other scholarly fields. In considering the validity of that criticism, I distinguish two models of learning: the covering law model exemplified by the natural sciences, and the model of rooted particularity that…

This article discusses how museum settings can provide opportunities for sensory and aesthetic encounters and learning. It draws on research into museum education programmes that included examinations of curatorial construction and display, observations of teaching and open-ended interviews with museum educators. The examples selected here focus…

This article examines the relationship between academic specialization and student exposure to a range of academic domains of knowledge. It uses a concentration measure--the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index--to investigate whether students who choose single majors or double major are more or less concentrated in nine domains of knowledge most…

This article seeks to reignite debate about the purpose of a university music education. Taking inspiration from Randall Thompson's 1935 investigation of the role of music preparation in U.S. colleges and universities, an analogous call is made for a less vocational approach to the study of music. The author claims that the music education…

Previous studies about writing assignments in higher education have explained that the library research paper, report on experiment, summary, and article/book review were the most common writing assignment tasks assigned across disciplines. No previous studies have explored writing tasks in the TESOL discipline at a national level. In this study…

Purpose: This study had two main objectives: The first was to explore the extent to which a group of University lecturers feel that they are prepared to deal with controversial issues in their classrooms. The second was to elicit their views on a didactic approach known as Structured Academic Controversy (SAC). SAC is a constructivist teaching…

The goal of this paper is to estimate the impact of labor demand on time to the doctorate. Empirical investigation of this relationship in previous research was hampered by the difficulty of measuring labor demand. I construct a measure of labor demand in seven fields in the humanities and social sciences based on the annual number of job listings…

Recent studies have highlighted the potential role of basic numerical processing in the acquisition of numerical and mathematical competences. However, it is debated whether high-level numerical skills and mathematics depends specifically on basic numerical representations. In this study mathematicians and nonmathematicians performed a basic…

This case study describes the process that the Humanities Programme Team, in Dublin City University's Open Education Unit, has undertaken with regard to developing a systematic, programme-focused assessment strategy. It charts the development of an Assessment Matrix that facilitated the enhancement of programme coherence in the context of a…