Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of computer based business simulations in higher education as innovative tools of teaching and learning to enhance students' practical understanding of real business problems. Whether the integration of business simulation technologies will enable significant innovation in teaching and…

How useful are podcasts in the political science classroom? Some educators argue that podcasts will revolutionize education; others are less convinced. However, to date, the evidence on podcasts has been slim. This article reports the results of a year-long trial using podcasts to aid in teaching political science to undergraduates at a research…

In this article, the authors report on a study that was carried out at the University College of Boras. Teachers using an online learning platform (WebCT) were surveyed to see to what extent they made use of the various features available to them on the learning platform. The extent to which teachers employed all the features was low. The article…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze those US campuses that became signatories of the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) during the charter membership period of December 2006 through September 15, 2007. Design/methodology/approach: The paper draws on literature in organizational change,…

The common approach to scaling, according to Christopher Dede, a professor of learning technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is to jump in and say, "Let's go out and find more money, recruit more participants, hire more people. Let's just keep doing the same thing, bigger and bigger." That, he observes, "tends to…

Calls for schools to "improve" are everywhere, but recently calls for schools to "transform" have proliferated, based on the idea that schools are not simply underperforming but outdated if not obsolete. Most prominently, scholars and authors such as Phillip Schlechty, Peter Senge, and Francis Duffy have targeted school and…

This longitudinal case study describes the factors that affect an experienced teacher's attempt to shift her pedagogical practices in order to implement embedded elements of argument into her science classroom. Research data was accumulated over 2 years through video recordings of science classes. The Reformed Teacher Observation Protocol (RTOP)…

Purpose: This paper aims to analyse the reform syndrome, bottle-neck effects and their impacts on teachers and school education in the last ten years and highlight the direction of new developments. Design/methodology/approach: The paper examines educational reforms in Hong Kong in the last decade. Findings: Echoing the international trends of…

This article examines a Victorian high school's implementation of a new Year 9 program which was intended to interrupt a traditional academic curriculum and to create an imagined oasis of care and personal development for students. It explores ways in which (1) the existing culture and context of the school continues to frame the subjectivities of…

Creative Partnerships aims to change the ways in which children learn and teachers teach, and to support whole school change. Our research examines how schools take up the "cultural offer" made by Creative Partnerships. In this article, drawing on data from snapshot visits to 40 English schools, we suggest that it has made a difference…

The discipline of history is threatened, but with genuine innovation and creative teaching, it will prevail. However, the instructor must be skeptical of innovation; new methods and techniques must be evaluated and validated, not just adopted for the sake of innovation alone. (DC)

The purpose was to identify characteristics of the faculty and departments which had voluntarily initiated instructional innovations through the Educational Development Program (EDP). A profile of the participating faculty was developed and characteristics of 90 EDP project directors were compared with those of a random sample of 250 other faculty…

SINCE SOME FORMS OF EXPERIMENTATION ARE NOT ADAPTABLE TO THE TYPICAL COLLEGE OPERATION, A MULTICOLLEGE SYSTEM, IN ADDITION TO ENCOURAGING INNOVATION AND INSTRUCTIONAL RESEARCH, SHOULD CONTAIN ONE EXPERIMENTAL COLLEGE. WHILE LOCATED ON ONE OF THE DISTRICT'S CAMPUSES, IT WOULD HAVE ITS OWN FACILITY AND ADMINISTRATIVE INDEPENDENCE. A DISTRICT…

THIS CONFERENCE ON EXPERIMENTATION AND INNOVATION DEALT WITH THE FOLLOWING TOPICS--(1) "EXPERIMENTAL COLLEGES IN AMERICA," AN OVERVIEW OF THE DIFFICULTIES AND DANGERS OF INNOVATION, (2) "THE EXPERIMENTAL COLLEGE AT BERKELEY," DESCRIBING A "PROBLEMS" APPROACH TO AVOID THE "DOMINATION OF... THE ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE," (3) "THE LIBRARY-COLLEGE,"…