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The evaluation and continuous improvement of the quality of teaching and learning in higher education is an issue of sustained concern. While most universities are implementing systems of quality assurance, there is substantial variation in the principles underlying these systems. La Trobe University has developed and implemented a university‐wide system of quality assurance that ensures that each subject is systematically reviewed and enhanced by those teaching in the subject. While it incorporates compulsory student evaluation of teaching of each subject the result of this student evaluation is not the focus of the quality assurance system. The focus is on ensuring that those teaching the subject, reflect on and make recommendations for further improvement of the subject. Outlines the quality assurance system, the principles on which it is based and describes and analyses the processes engaged in during its development.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the state of production and operations management (P/OM) teaching in universities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in terms of course characteristics, objectives, content, adopted textbooks, didactic materials, teaching faculty, teaching methods, assessment tools, and course requisites.

Due to the exploratory nature of this study and the small population surveyed, the author employed descriptive statistical analysis such as frequencies, percentages, means, and standard deviations.

The results show that in the majority of UAE universities offering P/OM as a college‐requirement course, it is being taught by highly qualified and well‐trained teaching faculty. The main objectives of P/OM courses are: teaching students how to analyse and understand situations from an operations perspective; understanding the links between strategy, production, capacity and core competencies; and preparing students to be able to understand how supply chains work, including the ability to forecast production levels. More emphasis is placed upon operational and tactical issues rather than on strategic issues. The most common assessment methods used in P/OM courses were found to be theoretical examinations with questions, student projects, practical examinations, and class participation. The most frequently covered topics in P/OM courses in UAE universities include competitiveness, strategy, productivity, strategic capacity planning for products and services, supply chain management, forecasting, introduction to operations management, product and service design, and management of quality. Lecturing is the main teaching method used in P/OM courses. The main didactic materials used were found to be textbooks, manuals of problems/solution and case studies, class notes taken by students, and externally produced software.

This study has a number of limitations. For example, it is based mainly on a questionnaire as a tool of data collection. Questionnaires have a number of drawbacks which might affect the results of the study. In addition, the study is based only on the viewpoint of teaching faculty rather than students. Nevertheless, the implications of the study for course developers, instructors, and managers are discussed.

The paper is the first to assess P/OM teaching in UAE universities.

To report study findings on teaching effectiveness and feedback mechanisms in Kenyan universities, which can guide management in developing a comprehensive quality control policy.

The study adopted an exploratory descriptive design. Three public and two private universities were randomly selected to participate in the study. A random sampling procedure was also used to select 79 respondents to participate in the research. A questionnaire administered in all participating universities was the main instrument for data collection.

There was no clear university policy on the evaluation of teaching effectiveness, despite its importance in quality control. Student evaluation of teaching effectiveness (SETE) was found to be unreliable, although widely used where evaluation existed, without other evaluation support systems. Feedback from the evaluation, though crucial in professional improvement, was not made available to the respondents.

The study examined the evaluation of teaching effectiveness from the lecturers' perspectives. Further research may provide insights into the contribution of SETE to teaching effectiveness from the students' standpoint.

Use of a variety of evaluation tools (e.g. self, peer) rather than relying solely on SETE is necessary. Comprehensive and usable information may be provided for effective teaching. Universities should provide clear policy guidelines on quality control for faculties to develop multiple teaching effectiveness evaluation instruments.

Teaching evaluation is important in order to bring about an improvement in areas such as student achievement, and use of public funds or educational materials. The findings provide critical information for management decision making to assist universities to translate the resources at their disposal into learning outcomes.

Interdisciplinary approaches to climate change teaching are well justified and arise from the complexity of climate change challenges and the integrated problem-solving responses they demand. These approaches require academic teachers to collaborate across disciplines. Yet, the fragmentation typical of universities impedes collaborative teaching practice. This paper aims to report on the outcomes of a distributed leadership project in four Australian universities aimed at enhancing interdisciplinary climate change teaching.

Communities of teaching practice were established at four Australian universities with participants drawn from a wide range of disciplines. The establishment and operation of these communities relied on a distributed leadership methodology which facilitates acts of initiative, innovation, vision and courage through group interaction rather than through designated hierarchical roles.

Each community of practice found the distributed leadership approach overcame barriers to interdisciplinary climate change teaching. Cultivating distributed leadership enabled community members to engage in peer-led professional learning, collaborative curriculum and pedagogical development, and to facilitate wider institutional change. The detailed outcomes achieved by each community were tailored to their specific institutional context. They included the transformation of climate change curriculum, professional development in interdisciplinary pedagogy, innovation in student-led learning activities, and participation in institutional decision-making related to curriculum reform.

Collaborative, non-traditional leadership practices have attracted little attention in research about sustainability education in university curricula. This paper demonstrates that the distributed leadership model for sustainability education reported here is effective in building capacity for interdisciplinary climate change teaching within disciplines. The model is flexible enough for a variety of institutional settings.

This paper examines how institutions of higher education might operationalize faculty performance evaluation in terms of research, teaching, and university and community service. An analytic hierarchy process model is developed and presented, allowing decision makers to couple performance evaluation and academic reward/awards and recognitions offered by institutions of higher education, and provides an objective way to compare faculty members. Weights are provided for each of the criteria in the evaluation process for a more objective outcome. Reward/award systems might include promotion decisions, merit pay, tenure, long‐term contracts, and annual reward/awards of excellence in research, teaching or service. The model might be used to make judgment on the qualification of candidates for such systems, and could be used on the department level, college level, or university‐wide level. In addition, the model could rank faculty members within each discipline or major. An illustrative example is provided of the model at the United Arab Emirates University.

The purpose of this paper is to explore parents as “stakeholders” in higher education in England and how they perceive teaching excellence.

The study adopted a qualitative research design using an interpretative approach through which the authors aimed to develop understandings of parents’ perspectives as higher education “stakeholders”. The empirical data were gathered via focus group interviews and an online survey with 24 participants in the UK.

This study found that the majority of parents wished to be treated as an important stakeholder group in higher education. Parent participants perceived that teaching excellence could be evidenced through indicators and measures, for example, the design and delivery of the courses, progress measures, contact hours, speed of return of marked work, graduate employability and so on. They also saw value and significance in the students’ exposure to ideas and perspectives not previously experienced, in zeal and passion in the teaching, and in an academically nurturing, understanding and supportive pedagogical relationship between academic and student.

This study uncovered some apparent tensions, contradictions and challenges for parents as stakeholders in higher education, for example, in reconciling the co-existence of their desire to be involved and engaged with scope for students to be formed as independent young adults. Parents’ desire to measure teaching excellence is also compounded by their concern that excellent teaching is thereby reduced to a box-ticking exercise. This study has implications for higher education institutions wishing to engage parents as a stakeholder group in a meaningful way.

Public universities worldwide are under growing pressure to increase efficiency. Understanding how teaching and research contribute to the overall efficiency of university operations is of great importance for universities to improve their performance. This paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper adopts a holistic approach to evaluate university efficiency from three perspectives including overall university operations efficiency, university teaching efficiency and university research efficiency. It applies the technique of data envelopment analysis to 36 Australian universities during the period 2011–2015 to evaluate their relative efficiency from these three perspectives. A strategic group analysis is further conducted for exploring the source of inefficiency of an individual university in its respective strategic group.

This study reveals that Australian universities maintain a comparatively high level of efficiency in terms of overall operations and research during the period 2011–2015. Teaching efficiency, however, is underwhelming during this period. It further shows that universities with low efficiency seeking to improve their overall operations efficiency can allocate the limited resource to teaching instead of research.

This study is crucial to both Australian government and Australian universities. The government is provided with the information about the optimum performance levels for universities under certain fixed resource. As a result, resources or funding can be allocated based on the performance ranking. The efficiency information is also in demand among Australian universities. In order to successfully strive for more funding from the federal government in an environment of increased competition, universities need to not only know their relative position among their peers, but also get guidelines on how to improve their performance.

The novelty of this study lies in the decomposing of efficiency models to identify inefficiencies in university operations. Such a study provides individual universities with valuable information on how they can make full use of their resources to improve their efficiency in an increasingly competitive environment.

The article explores the current as well as the future concepts of university teaching by the academics/the “leaders of educational sciences” in the context of the changes of the academia that have affected the academic professionalization.

The Delphi method was implemented to answer a research question dealing with the possible change in academics' concept of teaching as part of their current and future work. In this study, the experienced academics in the area of educational science are seen as the “leaders” since through their intensive teaching activities on all three levels (bachelor, master and doctoral) as well as through the high-quality research, they “lead” the concept of a particular science as well as the educational policy. Four rounds were used for consensus building among “leaders” based on a multiple interaction in an anonymous setting.

The research points out that academic professionalization in research is at its maximum. The currently perceived concept of teaching is content-oriented. However, the results also indicate the need for a gradual change in training Czech academics, should they accept their role also as university teachers in the future and be able to highlight the predicted change of teaching to support learning. Whether the strategy of a particular university will or will not accept all the academics' diverse roles seems to become the crucial factor.

Several rounds with the same group of experts, which is the principle of Delphi method, is at the same time a limitation of the study, as in most of the research based on this method. The participation in the expert panel dropped throughout the rounds; however, geographic (in terms of university) dispersion of participating experts remained. The final fourth round confirmed the collective judgments of academics.

The article broadens the understanding of changes in the content of academics' professionalization with respect to changes in the academia. It emphasizes the role of an academic as an educator and concludes with the need of institutional reform in the context of a single university in a decentralized system.

The article questions the trends of (national) educational policy in the sense that academics at universities are not only scientists but also teachers. However, the study also shows that the acceptance of their teaching abilities remains mainly on the organizational level.

A less common method of data collection among rather rarely involved group of experts in educational sciences brings a different view of the profession of academics, who (not only in the Czech context) are seen mainly as researchers and not as teachers. Humboldt's ideal regarding the unity of diverse roles is, thus, threatened due to narrower focus on academics' professionalization.

This study aims to establish the online teaching behaviour of university lecturers as well as examine issues and challenges for online teaching in universities in Zimbabwe during the COVID-19 era and beyond.

The study assumed a quantitative approach that employed a structured questionnaire for data collection. Structural equation modelling using AMOS version 22 and independent samples t-test were used for data analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis was used for data purification.

The results of the study showed that organisational factors, technological factors, pedagogical factors, student factors and the gender of lecturers have a significant influence on the behavioural intentions of lecturers to teach online. The results also showed that the behavioural intentions of lecturers to teach online has a significant influence on the actual online teaching behaviour of the lecturers. The results also showed that lecturers mostly used the WhatsApp platform for teaching. Issues and challenges affecting the online teaching behaviour of lecturers in universities in Zimbabwe were also identified.

The results of this study have implications for policy and practice with regard to online teaching and learning during periods of pandemics and beyond.

The results showed that for effective teaching to be done in universities, universities should not continue focusing on single platforms such as blackboard, Moodle and others, but should allow for a multimedia approach that factors in platforms such as WhatsApp, Google Classroom and others. This will ensure that even universities with limited technology infrastructure will be able to have online teaching occurring.

The study demonstrated the influence of gender in online teaching by showing that there are gender differences in the way university lecturers conduct online teaching. This also has implication on teaching and policy as these results demonstrate a need for universities to come up with strategies and policies that ensure despite gender differences, university lecturers should be able to effective teach online.

While the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology has been widely used in research, the current study represents the first opportunity that the theory has been used to establish the online teaching behaviour of university lecturers in the context of Zimbabwe.

This paper aims to take Chinese university teachers as the research objects to examine their self-evaluation of online teaching and analyze the main factors influencing their evaluation during COVID-19.

According to the theory of educational ecology, the factors influencing teachers' self-evaluation of online teaching in this paper include university background, courses background and teachers' personal background from the macro- to micro-levels. Through exploratory factor analysis, independent sample T-test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), the self-evaluation of online teaching of 13,997 teachers from 334 universities and their relationship with teachers' background have been subject to data statistics and analysis.

Teachers' self-evaluation of online teaching mainly includes three dimensions: online teaching methods, online teacher–student interaction and online teaching techniques. There are significant differences in these three dimensions among teachers with different background characteristics, including regions, the types of universities, the nature of universities in macro background levels, the types and numbers of online courses in meso background levels, and the gender, years of teaching, professional titles and disciplines in micro background levels.

To improve teachers' self-evaluation of online teaching, it is suggested to build an online teaching self-evaluation system for teachers, strengthen university support and guarantee, strengthen online teaching training and improve the information accomplishments of teachers.

This large-scale empirical survey of online teaching evaluation of Chinese teachers can provide scholars with a deeper understanding of the implementation of online teaching in China and the self-evaluation of online teaching by teachers.