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University students' ratings of teaching and teachers' performance are used in many parts of the world for the evaluation of faculty members at colleges and universities. Even though these ratings receive mixed reviews, there is little conclusive evidence on the role of the intervening variable of teacher and student gender in these ratings. Possible influences resulting from gender-related differences in different socio-cultural contexts, especially where gender combination in student and faculty population is not proportionate, have not been adequately investigated in previous research. This study aimed to examine Iranian university students' ratings of the professional performance of male and female university teachers and to explore the differences in male and female university students' evaluation of teachers of the same or opposite gender. The study was a questionnaire-based cross-sectional survey with a total of 800 randomly selected students in their different years of undergraduate study (307 male and 493 female students, reflecting the proportion of male and female students in the university) from different faculties at the University of Kashan, Iran. The participants rated male and female teachers’ performance in observing university regulations, relationship with colleagues, and relationships with students. The researchers used descriptive statistics, means comparison inferential statistics and focus-group interview data to analyze and compare the students’ ratings. The results of one-sample t-test, independent samples t-test, and Chi-square analyses showed that a) overall, male university teachers received significantly higher overall ratings in all areas than female teachers; b) male students rated male teachers significantly higher than female students did; and c) female students assigned a higher overall mean rating to male teachers than to female teachers but this mean difference was not significant. These results are studied in relation to the findings in the related literature and indicate that gender can be an important intervening variable in university students' evaluation of faculty members.

Student transitions from secondary to tertiary education have attracted global attention as universities and colleges of higher education seek to improve student retention. Over the course of one academic year, I documented the transitional experiences of first-year male Emirati students at a college of higher education in a rural location of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In this paper I describe four categories of cultural border crossing experiences – smooth, managed, difficult, and impossible – with easier and smoother crossing experiences associated with close congruency (related to the students’ self-perceived attitude and scholastic preparedness as broadly reflected in their competence in their second language, English) between the predominantly Arabic life-world associated with Emirati families and government schooling and the dominant Western/English language culture in institutes of higher education. Additionally, I describe and evaluate students’ cultural border crossing experiences with some Foundation program faculty, finding that those teachers who developed a classroom culture based on Kleinfeld’s (1975) notion of ‘warm demandingness’ and caring rapport-building appeared to have the most positive impact upon the students. Implications from this research have the potential to positively impact both the student and faculty classroom experience in the Gulf tertiary classroom, in addition to improving overall student retention rates.

This study aims to investigate how sustainability has been incorporated – or mainstreamed - in a school at one university through techniques of responsibilization and accountabilization.

Inspired by the extended case study methodology, the authors participated, observed and analyzed two audit-inspired processes, whose aims included ensuring that sustainability was integrated into the educational process.

By following two audit-inspired processes, the authors show how teachers were asked to respond to open-ended survey questions and by doing so emerged as responsibilized subjects. Although the teachers were given lots of space to interpret the concept of sustainability and show how it was translated into the programs and courses offered, the teachers were made accountable as established organizational hierarchies were reproduced when responsibilization was formalized through techniques of accountabilization.

The analysis moves beyond the instrumental epistemologies characterizing much of the positivist-oriented research in higher education. As with all studies, the authors study also has methodological limitations, such as involving a single higher education institution. There is a general need for more empirical research in this area in order to build theory and to understand whether the concepts of responsibilization and accountabilization can also be applied in other higher education contexts.

The study shows that higher education administrators engage in processes of responsibilization and accountabilization through formalized processes of interpellation, as documents and self-assessment exercises tie teachers to organizational contexts.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that introduces the concepts of responsibilization and accountabilization as social relationships in higher education governance.

Background: How many higher education researchers are there in the world? How many academic articles are published by researchers each year? This paper aims to answer these two questions by tracking the number of higher education teachers and the number of publications over the past four decades.

Methods: We collected data on the number of higher education institutions and researchers from the United Nations, the World Bank, and the US, China, and UK governments (three countries with the largest number of academic publications in recent years). We used Scopus to obtain the number of publications per year. The growth of higher education researchers and academic publications were characterized using 4-parameter logistic models.

Results: The number of higher education teachers-cum-researchers increased from 4 million in 1980 to 13.1 million in 2018 worldwide. Concurrently, the number of academic publications increased from 0.65 million in 1980 to 3.16 million in 2018 based on data from Scopus. At the country level, the number of academic publications from the USA increased from 0.15 million in 1980 to 0.70 million in 2018, while that from China increased by almost 1,000 times from 629 in 1980 to 0.60 million in 2018.

Conclusions: The number of higher education researchers would reach 13.6 million and they would publish 3.21 million academic articles in 2020, imposing enormous pressure to publishers, peer-reviewers, and people who want to understand emerging scientific development. Additionally, not all academic publications are easily assessable because most articles are behind pay-walls. In addition, unethical research practices including falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, slicing publication, publication in a predatory journal or conference, etc. may hinder scientific and human development.

Recently, various policies have been implemented in Saudi Arabia to reform science teaching at K-12 levels in order to focus on critical thinking, inquiry-based learning, and problem solving. Research is needed to explore the adequacy of teacher preparation programs to determine whether these programs sufficiently prepare Saudi science teachers to teach according to these new reforms. This study explores the challenges that Saudi pre-service science teachers face in these higher education programs. Results indicated that graduates of the programs studied were satisfied with their experiences; however, various concerns were expressed by some pre-service teachers regarding the theory-practice gap between their university coursework and field experiences, and the supervision structures and functions in place for the professional experiences component. Modifications to the teacher preparation programs are suggested in order to address these concerns and to successfully enact reforms in science education in Saudi Arabia.

This research aims to examine the educational philosophy of teachers in classrooms. Teachers' educational philosophy influences the power balance, course content function, student and teacher roles, responsibility for learning and assessment purposes and processes. The research also analyzes whether gender, qualification, specialization and experience significantly influence classroom educational philosophies.

The study utilized a quantitative research design, utilizing data from 193 teachers working in a public higher education institution in the Sultanate of Oman. The study utilized a survey method to solicit data from the respondents. Besides utilizing descriptive statistics such as mean and standard deviation, the study used analysis of variance (ANOVA) and t-test to test the hypotheses.

Analysis revealed an instructional strategy's preference, including elements of both teacher-centered and student-centered educational philosophies. Elements of progressivism, constructivism, reconstructivism and perennialism are more relevant in the teacher's instructional design. The results show no significant differences in teachers' pedagogical philosophy that exist based on gender, specialization and experience. However, teachers' age significantly influences their educational philosophy preferences.

This research centers on a public higher education institution in the Sultanate of Oman, with a particular focus on the Department of Business Studies. This resarch delimits its discussion on teachers' chosen educational philosophy. Other possible factors may also impact student retention and effective teaching and learning.

This research offers valuable insights to academicians, higher education administrators, and policymakers. Specifically, this research emphasizes the significance of employing a blended approach, which incorporates both student-centered and teacher-centered educational philosophies, to enhance student engagement, retention, and effective teaching and learning.

This research emphasizes the importance of educators' adoption of a blended educational philosophy in promoting student retention and engagement within higher education institutions. To achieve desirable outcomes, policymakers in higher education must ascertain which educational philosophy is most effective in the classroom. Additionally, ensuring congruence between preferred educational philosophy and teachers’  instructional practices is vital in facilitating effective teaching and learning.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first of its kind among teachers in higher education in the Sultanate of Oman. The outcome of this study helps detail the specific strategies teachers deploy and categorize into various educational philosophies.

With the proliferation of international education initiatives, research into the transfer of pedagogy across cultures is essential to ensure that quality education is delivered in a culturally accessible form. One of the factors impeding such research is the lack of widely accepted theoretical frameworks (Dimmock & Walker, 2005). This paper examines the development and effectiveness of a cross cultural framework that was used to compare a Business program at a Canadian College with its branch campus in Qatar (Prowse & Goddard, 2010). Findings are compared to results in the literature to gauge the robustness of the framework. The framework developed in the study was found to be a helpful means of allowing a comparison of pedagogy across two cultures.

Changes in society, the economy and health require a response from higher education regarding the training of professionals, specifically, future teachers. In this sense, active methodologies constitute, in line with the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development, a key strategic element in teacher training, given the need to educate for sustainability and social responsibility (SR). This study aims to examine innovative teaching-learning experiences based on the use of active methodologies and the interaction with sustainability and SR on the part of university students in Education.

The methodology constitutes a systematic review of the qualitative, inductive and exploratory literature, on the basis of the PRISMA declaration principles. The sample is composed of research published between 2011 and 2021 in the world’s most important scientific databases in the educational context (WoS, Scopus and Eric-ProQuest).

This study reveals the methodologies that are most commonly used in ecological literacy, their implications for the acquisition of competencies in terms of curriculum sustainability and their relationship with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and SR. Higher education must reflect and demonstrate awareness of its social mission and pedagogical effectiveness, to transform education, taking as a reference the sustainability and SR in the university student’s curriculum.

One of the main limitations of this study is the scarcity of research studies that include, jointly, the key descriptors analysed in this contribution such as teacher training, active methodologies, sustainability and SR. Another limitation to observe in this work is related to having considered as inclusion criteria solely research published in open access journals, since other research published in closed access journals is omitted.

This work demonstrates the usefulness of active methodologies in the training and professional development of future Education students in “sustainability”.