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This chapter addresses international educational governance by exploring some of the factors contributing to increasingly internationalized national educational policymaking and the ways that related trends in educational policymaking either constrain or shift to meet particular needs and challenges within specific national contexts. After discussing the phenomenon and the impact of globalization on international educational governance, the role of the state, and some examples of both contextualization and bounded rationality, the impact of national policy convergence is discussed. This chapter concludes by summarizing the ways that national policy convergence became the focus of international educational governance and national educational policy based on the same ideas and structure through seemingly different implementation, but often-identical measurable outcomes. Examples from Japan and Saudi Arabia highlight the discussion.

S. Karin Amos is professor of education with a special emphasis on comparative and multicultural education at the Eberhard Karls University at Tuebingen. Her research interests include the role of education in the construction of societal membership, transnational educational governance, and cultural studies and education.

In October 2008, a group of international scholars met at Hohentuebingen Castle, in Tuebingen, Germany, to discuss issues of international governance in education. At that time, governance as an analytical concept was just beginning to be more widely discussed in German educational science. These discussions were primarily in the context of new forms of organizational steering and with regards to a changing embeddedness of national education systems attributed to processes of globalization and fiscal austerity. In addition, a large interdisciplinary research project located at the University of Bremen, TranState, was already exerting considerable international influence with a decidedly comparative perspective on those areas of German educational science. However, in this early phase, the debate on international governance in education was limited and focused heavily on emerging theories of governance, among colleagues at the University of Tuebingen, both at the Institute of Education as well as in other parts of the faculty. To me, Frank-Olaf Radtke was the key person who had first drawn my attention to educational governance, and I was especially grateful for having had the opportunity to continue our previous exchanges in the context of the Tuebingen meeting.

This paper compares and contrasts practice-based perceptions of the research–practice gap in the United States (US) with those in Australia.

The current study extends the work of Tucker and Lowe (2014) by comparing and contrasting their Australian-based findings with evidence from a questionnaire survey and follow-up interviews with senior representatives of 18 US state and national professional accounting associations.

The extent to which academic research informs practice is perceived to be limited, despite the potential for academic research findings to make a significant contribution to management accounting practice. We find similarities as well as differences in the major obstacles to closer engagement in the US and Australia. This comparison, however, leads us to offer a more fundamental explanation of the divide between academic research and practice framed in terms of the relative benefits and costs of academics engaging with practice.

Rather than following conventional approaches to ‘bridging the gap’ by identifying barriers to the adoption of research, we suggest that only after academics have adequate incentives to speak to practice can barriers to a more effective diffusion of their research findings be surmounted.

This study makes three novel contributions to the “relevance literature” in management accounting. First, it adopts a distinct theoretical vantage point to organize, analyze, and interpret empirical evidence. Second, it captures practice-based views about the nature and extent of the divide between research and practice. Third, it provides a foundational assessment of the generalizability of the gap by examining perceptions of it across two different geographic contexts.

Out‐of‐home care has been a subject for policy debate since child welfare policies were first developed. Too often the debate is marked by ill‐informed sound‐bites linking “care” with negative descriptors such as “drift” or “languish”. The purpose of this paper is to urge a more nuanced understanding informed by the large volume of research from across jurisdictional boundaries.

The historical, cultural and political contexts in which studies on children's out‐of‐home care have been conducted are reviewed, since these impact on the characteristics of the children, the aims of the care service in any particular jurisdiction, and the outcomes for those entering care. The paper also scopes the large volume of English language descriptive and process research (and the smaller number of outcome studies) on the different placement options.

The outcomes of out‐of‐home care are different for different groups of children, and care needs to be taken not to over‐simplify the evidence about processes and outcomes. The generally negative view of the potential of out‐of‐home care is not based on evidence.

The authors, from their North American and UK/European perspectives, provide an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses, both of the available research and of the care services themselves.

Purpose: The current study aims to cast light on the divide between academic research in management accounting and its applicability to practice by examining, from the standpoint of nursing, how this gap is perceived and what challenges may be involved in bridging it.

Design/Methodology/Approach: The current study compares the findings of Tucker and Parker (2014) with both quantitative as well as qualitative evidence from an international sample of nursing academics.

Findings: The findings of this study point to the differing tradition and historical development in framing and addressing the research–practice gap between management accounting and nursing contexts and the rationale for practice engagement as instrumental in explaining disciplinary differences in addressing the research–practice gap.

Research Implications Despite disciplinary differences, we suggest that a closer engagement of academic research in management accounting with practice “can work,” “will work,” and “is worth it.” Central to a closer relationship with practice, however, is the need for management accounting academics to follow their nursing counterparts and understand the incentives that exist in undertaking research of relevance.

Originality/value: The current study is one of the few that has sought to look to the experience of other disciplines in bridging the gap. Moreover, to our knowledge, it is the first study in management accounting to attempt this comparison. In so doing, our findings provide a platform for further considering how management accounting researchers, and management accounting as a discipline might, in the spirit of this study’s title, “Learn from the Experience of Others.”

This chapter explores the challenges and opportunities that teaching and learning in a synchronous online environment pose by examining information literacy (IL) provision at the Open University (OU), which will serve as a case study.

The OU provides distance education. While its flexibility offers more individuals an opportunity to start a course, it can be more challenging to ensure students develop their skills and knowledge and calls for innovative and engaging teaching methods.

The OU Library’s Live Engagement Team runs a program of digital information literacy (DIL) sessions. The team’s online pedagogy is built on retention and success and involves the careful planning, designing and delivering of DIL sessions, creating numerous interactive moments to increase teaching effectiveness.

The virtual enquiry desk allows students to consult library staff synchronously via the library helpdesk’s webchat service, which is delivered 24 hours a day. One of the advantages of this service is that students interact directly by having a dialogue with library staff in which they can ask further questions.

Both services carry out continuous reviews of the ways they operate, innovate and intervene. The chapter provides first-hand experiences of what has worked well in information literacy teaching in synchronous online spaces.