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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.

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.

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.

This article presents our experience in implementing the assessment for learning process (AfL) to enhance the teaching–learning quality, which has faced numerous challenges impacting educational quality. The effectiveness of this technique is demonstrated through a case study conducted in a core course of chemical engineering.

The article shares insights into the systematic course design and planning processes that were discussed and developed through AfL practices. Significant emphasis is placed on implementing formative and summative student self-assessment surveys as simple yet effective methods to meet this purpose. Quantitative data were collected and analyzed over three consecutive academic years (2020–2022) using various statistical parameters such as percentage, interquartile range and the program’s numerical goal (%G).

The AfL process via formative and summative surveys could significantly and effectively improve teaching–learning quality. These findings assist educators in identifying appropriate teaching methods and recognizing areas of weakness and strength, thereby facilitating continuous improvement in the teaching–learning quality. Validation methods, including quizzes and numerical grades, were employed to practically verify the outcome obtained from the questionnaires.

The AfL techniques demonstrated in this study can be directly implemented or adapted for various educational fields to enhance the teaching–learning quality.

The practical implementation of AfL in an engineering context has hardly been reported, particularly in chemical engineering. This work represents the practical implementation of AfL to enhance engineering field education.

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.

Entrepreneurship Education (EE) has received substantial attention, both in the popular press, as well as in academia, owing to the socio-economic impact it holds. However, while the importance of entrepreneurship is universally acknowledged, specific higher-order outcomes EE aim to achieve have not received the same level of attention. This study aims to fill this void by analysing teaching and learning approaches to EE in Africa, as well as the competencies that these EE initiatives aim to build. The study makes use of a qualitative research approach in the form of a systematic review of EE studies conducted in Africa. The systematic review aimed to uncover which approaches and competencies EE initiatives apply. Results indicated that teaching and learning of EE in Africa are mainly focussed on learning for and about entrepreneurship, and to a lesser degree through entrepreneurship. The study therefore proposes the development of higher-order competencies in the form of envisioning and constructing. The study contributes in practice by proposing a shift in the approach to EE by building competencies in the areas of visionary thinking and market expansion, rather than gaining market share. The study also makes a theoretical contribution by critically reviewing teaching and learning approaches on EE and developed competencies, and expands the role that EE can play in market development and opportunity creation.

Formal programmes designed to develop university teaching and learning are often assumed to be spaces for interdisciplinary learning and exchange. Because such programmes bring together academics from a range of different disciplines to learn about university teaching and learning as an academic development activity, it would seem feasible to argue that these spaces for learning, and the learning which results from them, can be characterised as ‘interdisciplinary’. Academic development itself is often thought to be a project that fosters an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning. This chapter offers a narrative of the way academic development programmes support academics to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to their learning about university teaching and learning. We take graduate certificate programmes in university teaching and learning as the vehicle for our analysis. In doing so, the chapter makes three points. First, that academic development has the potential to be a ‘critical interdisciplinary space’. Second, that it is important for academics to see and experience the Graduate Certificate as an opportunity to develop interdisciplinary learning outcomes. The evidence at present reveals that interdisciplinary learning outcomes for academics feature more as an absent-presence rather than as a conscious decision about curriculum design. Third, the curriculum of graduate certificate programmes needs to have a coherent and theorised account of interdisciplinary teaching and learning embedded in the philosophy and approach of the course.

In this self-study, a pre-service teacher educator and her students in a pre-service teacher education program course elective – “21st Century Teaching and Learning with Technology” – explored and reflected upon the complexities of imbedding inquiry-based learning as both a method of teaching and for learning about integrating technology into teaching practice. They discovered that inquiry activities incorporating application, synthesis, and critical analysis functioned as effective learning vehicles through which individuals can explore their own orientations and understandings. An authentic task for learning in which students were tasked with taking on responsibility for a cross-disciplinary, multi-grade professional development workshop for classmates proved to be the cornerstone upon which students gained self-efficacy in terms of beliefs in personal abilities to integrate technology, refined pedagogical perspectives, and theorized ways to enhance and nurture inquiry-based teaching and learning environments in 21st century classrooms that infuse technology. Their development was due, in part, to how their instructor presented learning content and modeled practice that was shaped by philosophies of teaching and learning.

This chapter explores the circumstances in the global south that have been reshaping teaching and learning practices, with particular focus on the African context. Anchored on a literature review strategy, the chapter explores some of the key pressure points in the higher education context that have been the trigger of reforms in the core practice of teaching and learning in recent years. In particular, the chapter discusses the neoliberalism crisis associated with the coronavirus pandemic in higher education, drawing attention to the inequalities that it ignited: not all students were affected in the same way; not all universities or colleges were affected in the same way; and not all students had the learning technologies required to carry on their education in the same way. Alongside the COVID-19 concerns, the chapter reflects on other pressure points for change including developments in digital technologies and the internet and changing students and changing higher education markets in sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that these forces are among a wave of influences that higher education institutions across the African continent cannot ignore. They form a blend of neoliberal reforms that are pressurising academics to change pedagogical models and threatening certain core values of a university: academic freedom, autonomy, and truth. The chapter develops the argument that although multiple pressures – arising from the pervasive influences of technology and the COVID-19 pandemic – are mounting on the higher education sector to reform its pedagogical practices, it should not be at the expense of perpetuating injustices, particularly among students.

The literature on non-traditional classroom environments claims that the changed emphasis in higher education teaching from the lecturer to students has intensified the global focus on student-centred learning, prompting colleges and universities globally to introspect, re-examine, and re-structure their pedagogical approaches in an attempt to align with national educational policies, and to position themselves favourably with potential students in an increasingly competitive higher education environment. This is an environment that now relies heavily on digital learning technologies, which has provoked scholars such as Heick (2012) to perceive the change to the virtual as one that makes higher education institutions accessible from anywhere – in the cloud, at home, in the workplace, or restaurant. The COVID-19 crisis has reinforced the need for this flexibility. These forces have put universities and colleges under pressure to implement new teaching approaches in non-traditional classroom settings that are appropriate for, and responsive to, the COVID-19 crisis and students in terms of learning and social support. This chapter identified and appraised key teaching approaches. It is evident that there are three key teaching approaches that higher education institutions have adopted for delivering learning in an emergency and in a student-centred fashion. The three approaches, which include the time and place dispersion, transactional distance, and collaborative learning approaches, embrace social support because they are grounded in social constructivism. Academics need to be fully committed to the role of social support giving – that is, emotional, instrumental, informational, and appraisal support – in order to foster student wellbeing and cognitive development as students learn together but apart in non-traditional classrooms. The hurried manner in which teaching and learning practices in many higher education institutions have been moved to the online format has led academics to violate many key principles of the approaches they have adopted. And this situation is borne out in the case study discussed in Chapter 8 of this volume. A review of current remote teaching and learning practices is required if academics are to embrace the full principles of the approaches that are appropriate for teaching and learning in non-traditional classroom contexts.