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The purpose of this paper is to provide a reflective evaluation of the concept of the teaching commons as presented by authors Huber and Hutchings and to summarize expected outcomes from participation therein.

An appraisal of the book The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons is presented to explore the conception of the teaching commons. This review addresses the definition of the teaching commons and explores the establishment of, and participation in, the teaching commons as a means of advancing the scholarship of teaching and learning and for improving student learning.

A fundamental premise is developed suggesting that the development and utilization of a teaching commons will improve teaching and learning through the provision of a defined safeplace for conversations about teaching and learning and specific avenues to share information about teaching innovations for improving student learning. Sustained faculty engagement in a teaching commons must be supported by formalized institutional recognition and appropriate rewards.

A practical resource for faculty members involved in the scholarship of teaching and learning and for administrators developing teaching and learning centers or resources for utilization by faculty members.

This review examines the definition and establishment of a teaching commons for improving the scholarship of teaching and learning at the college and university levels.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of a change in teaching structure in improving the performance of students in an introductory management accounting subject at an Australian institution. The change in structure involved a shift in the balance between lecture and tutorial face‐to‐face contact hours with increased emphasis being placed on tutorials in an attempt to enhance the benefits of cooperative learning.

The paper evaluates the success of the new approach by comparing the performance of students across the two teaching structures. Specifically, the paper compares the performance of students on exam questions covering five key management accounting topics.

The results revealed that the new teaching structure (a two‐hour workshop‐based tutorial and a one‐hour lecture each week) improved student examination results significantly in comparison to the previous “traditional” approach.

This paper demonstrates the benefits of teaching and learning conducted in a small class size setting with the use of cooperative learning. Such an approach could be adopted more widely in the teaching and learning of accounting to enhance the generic and analytic skills of students.

This paper provides empirical evidence to support largely normative claims that cooperative learning when combined with greater focus on small class teaching can improve student performance.

Outlines a series of initiatives at both national and institutional levels which suggest that British higher education is becoming more serious about improving the quality of university teaching. National initiatives include the Teaching Quality Assessment exercise, the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme and the Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning. The establishment of the Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education is also briefly highlighted. At the institutional level initiatives include the creation of more effective units or centres to promote learning and teaching, many of which intend to offer teacher development programmes accredited by the new Institute for Learning and Teaching. Such units also provide a valuable range of workshops, consultancy and project support in order to help universities improve their understanding of the practice and the theory of teaching in higher education. Many such units also promote research, especially action research, into university teaching and learning.

In the field of education in China, a large number of learning management systems have been deployed, in which vast amounts of data on learners and learning processes have been stored. How can one make use of these data? How can one transform the data into information and knowledge that inform decision-making in teaching and optimize learning? These questions have become a matter of concern for educators and learners. Learning analytics helps to unlock the value of the learning process data, so that the data can become an important basis for prudent decisions and process optimization. 'Learning analytics' was listed in the 2013 NMC Horizon Report as one of the emerging technologies that will have a great impact on learning, teaching and innovative research in higher education in two to three years. The report notes that learning analytics aims to decipher trends and patterns in the teaching and learning process from educational big data. In this paper, an online course on the Moodle platform is used for the research. The study examines reflection on online teaching and learning based on massive records of the learning process from the perspective of a tutor employing learning analytics. It is a brand new form of reflection on teaching and learning. The analysis of interactive course forums can help tutors to focus on key teaching and learning activities, and achieve more accurate analysis than with conventional face-to-face teaching activities. The research indicates that learning analytics is effective in supporting tutor reflection on interactive online teaching and learning.

Focuses on learning outcomes in debates on teaching methods in higher education (HE). Presents six core learning outcomes and ten common teaching methods for each of the learning outcomes. Concludes that the search for any universally best teaching method is bound to be fruitless and should give way to the search for better ways of achieving particular learning outcomes. Recommends the widening of the repertoire of teaching methods available to academic staff as a means of diminishing the severity of the trade‐off between teaching effectiveness and teaching efficiency as the unit of teaching resource continues to fall.

Much educational practice taught at teaching colleges regarding the process of teaching and learning is derived from a theoretical base. Less is based on lessons learned from the observation of the actual process of teaching and learning. Undergraduate teachers and mature practitioners are left with unstructured and unsystematic personal reflections of the process of teaching and learning for meeting any deficiencies they may have perceived. Soft systems methodology is an approach that can fill this lacuna. It provides a structured and systematic as well as systemic, approach for analysing actual practices in organized human activities, or human activity systems, such as the institution of education. The methodology is of particular benefit for analysing the process of teaching and learning because it does not require starting the process as an identified and precisely defined problem requiring a commensurate solution, yet it is still capable of generating recommendations for improving the process. The methodology is applied to this process to discover whether it can reveal hitherto unrecognized teaching and learning activities which can be used to improve the process in question.

Emergency remote teaching is not the same as a systematic, carefully thought out, and designed online learning system. Emergency remote teaching is best perceived as merely a first step towards migrating into a fully fledged, and carefully designed, virtual or online mode of study. Notwithstanding, this chapter provides a theoretical explanation that justifies the relevance and importance of emergency remote teaching in higher education practice, in light of the global COVID-19 pandemic and related discontinuities. It asserts that emergency related teaching is justified by the urgent need to maintain continuity of teaching and learning and to avoid knowledge and skills decay. A systematic approach to evaluate the effectiveness of emergency remote teaching involves measuring variables across four dimensions; that is, context, input, process, and outcomes. Weighting these dimensions is necessary to ensure that context, input, and process are prioritised above outcomes because the essence of the teaching model, when implemented, is to get it in place swiftly in order for teaching and learning to continue. The effectiveness of emergency remote teaching is best assessed on the basis of its speedy set-up and implementation to maintain continuity of teaching, not on student outcomes. The chapter investigated the approach that a sample of colleges and universities have followed to evaluate their model of emergency remote teaching and contrast it with theory. The approach found in practice was not aligned to best practice. Based on the evidence, the chapter proposes an evaluation framework that institutions can adopt specifically for evaluating emergency remote teaching practice.

International figures on university expenditure on the development of next generation learning spaces (NGLS) are not readily available but anecdote suggests that simply retrofitting an existing classroom as an NGLS conservatively costs $AUD200,000, while developing new buildings often cost in the region of 100 million dollars and over the last five years, many universities in Australia, Europe and North America have developed new buildings. Despite this considerable investment, it appears that the full potential of these spaces is not being realised.

While researchers argue that a more student centred learning approach to teaching has inspired the design of next generation learning spaces (Tom, Voss, & Scheetz, 2008) and that changed spaces change practice (Joint Information Systems Committee, 2009) when ‘confronted’ with a next generation learning spaces for the first time, anecdotes suggest that many academics resort to teaching as they have always taught and as they were taught. This chapter highlights factors that influence teaching practices, showing that they are to be found in the external, organisational and personal domains.

We argue that in order to fully realise significant improvements in student outcomes through the sector’s investment in next generation learning spaces, universities need to provide holistic and systematic support across three domains – the external, the organisational and the personal domains, by changing policies, systems, procedures and localised practices to better facilitate changes in teaching practices that maximise the potential of next generation learning spaces.

This chapter explores the notion of teacher identity and how teacher education might help to create a strong and clear vision for what it means to be a professional teacher. Within the organizational features and structures of teacher education, the pedagogy that students of teaching experience is crucial in shaping their understanding of their sense of identity. Teacher education needs to acknowledge and respond to the needs, issues, and concerns students of teaching have and create expectations that push beyond the personal and strive for the professional. This chapter suggests that in recognizing the importance of pedagogical reasoning and understanding learning about teaching through an inquiry stance, that students of teaching might begin to not only recognize the importance of knowledge of practice but also begin to see how to create knowledge from practice. A vision for their professional identity is then borne of a need to see value in “noticing” through practice in order to become more informed about teaching and learning. In doing so, the importance of pedagogy as a relationship between teaching and learning and the teacher’s role in mediating that relationship can support the development of an identity as a professional teacher.

In order to teach science effectively, teachers need a strong background in science content as well as an understanding of productive methods of teaching. This includes inquiry-based learning that will cultivate conceptual development of science concepts with their students. Furthermore, it is imperative to use student-focused activities in high-needs schools to engage all students, particularly students of color, in the learning process. As a result, faculty from the teachHOUSTON Program and the Department of Physics at the University of Houston produced a Physics by Inquiry course to engage middle school and high school preservice teachers in interactive, inquiry-based teaching pedagogies for physics. This chapter provides an overview of the course. It also highlights the benefits of including such a course in a STEM teacher education program.