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This chapter attempts to capture what teaching excellence looks and feels like for students. Our research reports on research conducted by two student authors at separate institutions. It suggests that the most crucial aspect of the student experience of ‘teaching excellence’ is a teacher's ability to build rapport and create meaningful interpersonal relationships with their students. Leanne Hunt's research was conducted with her fellow students at the University of Bradford. She outlines how, for her participants, the student–teacher rapport informed a positive learning experience which translated into a mutual understanding of excellent teaching. Widening participation, college-based HE student Hollie Shaw, now at Sheffield Hallam University, defines teaching excellence as flexible enough to respond to student learning needs, but strong enough to inspire interest in the discipline. In this chapter, we consider their separate testimonies carefully: we argue that exploring unconscious bias furthers understanding of how differences between student and teacher may compromise interpersonal relations and so student recognition of a tutor's positive and crucial role in the student experience and the implications of how one might measure this given the emphasis on proxies for teaching excellence in the TEF. We suggest breaking down unconscious bias calls for embracing differences, reflection and recognising the complexities of contemporary staff and student university lives. This chapter's exploration of staff–student partnership opens up potential for the creation of more equitable and honest learning dynamics in higher education – where a nuanced understanding of ‘teaching excellence’ can be defined, understood and evidenced within a HEI, with external bodies such as the Office for Students, and included in the Teaching Excellence Framework.

The issues in the current Built Environment Higher Education (BEHE) curricula recognise a critical need for enhancing the quality of teaching. This paper aims to identify the need for a best practice in teaching within BEHE curricula and recommend a set of drivers to enhance the current teaching practices in the Built Environment (BE) education. The study focused on Section 1 of the National Student Survey (NSS) – Teaching on my course, with a core focus on improving student satisfaction, making the subject interesting, creating an intellectually stimulating environment and challenging learners.

The research method used in this study is the mixed method, a document analysis consisting of feedback from undergraduate students and a closed-ended questionnaire to the academics in the BEHE context. More than 375 student feedback were analysed to understand the teaching practices in BE and fed forward to developing the closed-ended questionnaire for 23 academics, including a Head of School, a Principal Lecturer, Subject Leads and Lecturers. The data was collected from Architecture, Construction Management, Civil Engineering, Quantity Surveying and Building surveying disciplines representing BE context. The data obtained from both instruments were analysed with content analysis to develop 24 drivers to enhance the quality of teaching. These drivers were then modelled using the interpretive structural modelling (ISM) method to identify their correlation and criticality to NSS Section 1 themes.

The study revealed 10 independent, 11 dependent and three autonomous drivers, facilitating the best teaching practices in BEHE. The study further recommends that the drivers be implemented as illustrated in the level partitioning diagrams under each NSS Section 1 to enhance the quality of teaching in BEHE.

The recommended set of drivers and the level partitioning can be set as a guideline for academics and other academic institutions to enhance the quality of teaching. This could be further used to improve student satisfaction and overall NSS results to increase the rankings of academic institutions.

New knowledge can be recognised with the ISM analysis and level partitioning diagrams of the recommended drivers to assist academics and academic institutions in developing the quality of teaching.

This study aimed to evaluate the impact of four cross-institutional teaching enhancement projects (TEPs), a relatively new form of professional collaboration. The focus is on the impact at departmental, institutional and cross-institutional levels because such impact is the main reason for establishing cross-institutional TEPs.

A professional capital framework guided the examination of decisional and social capitals at departmental, institutional and cross-institutional levels. A theory-of-change method was adopted to collect data from 35 sets of documents, 22 project members and 65 stakeholders.

The authors found five forms of impact, showing the development of decisional and social capitals mostly at institutional and cross-institutional levels, whilst signaling the relatively weak impact at departmental levels. Therefore, the values of cross-institutional TEPs have not been fully realized and future endeavors need to better utilize the capitals in programs.

Few studies evaluated the impact of large-scale, cross-institutional TEPs. The authors offered new contributions by gauging the impact of these under-explored forms of complex professional collaborations.

The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the need for knowledge management (KM) in the teaching‐learning process in technical educational institutions (TEIs) in India, and to assert the impact of information technology (IT) based KM intervention in the teaching‐learning process.

The approach of the paper is basically conceptual and descriptive. The paper studies the role of KM in facilitating knowledge sharing among stakeholders in TEIs in India and elaborates on the need for knowledge management in the teaching‐learning process. A KM framework for enhancement of knowledge sharing by the use of shared intellectual repositories (IRs) is proposed for the enhancement of teaching and learning in technical educational institutions in India.

The authors value the impact that KM can have in enhancing the quality of teaching and learning in TEIs, and underscore the need for credible research into the benefits and challenges that the implementation of IT‐based KM intervention will provide.

The paper emphasizes the urgent need for improvement in quality of education in TEIs in India using the tools and processes of knowledge management. The importance of the proposed framework lies in augmenting the teaching‐learning process, improving productivity, enhancing communication among academia, researchers and professionals, enhancing student perception and understanding of subjects, and providing a common platform for pooling individual knowledge towards a common knowledge base.

The paper helps academicians to understand the importance of IT‐supported KM concepts, tools and practices towards quality teaching and learning. It provides useful inputs to TEIs, which must recognize that implementation of KM will influence knowledge sharing among faculty, researchers, practitioners, experts, professionals and students and enable quality education for students. Furthermore, the development of an IT‐based KM system will facilitate the promotion of institutional value in the competitive academic society. However there exists the need to evaluate the proposed framework in TEIs in India.

Case study research undertaken in Spring 2019 uncovered that only a small percentage of a university workforce were able to engage with a large, influential teaching regulation. This “exclusivity” impacted on the relationships in the academic schools studied and by extension, the capacity that the regulation had to enhance teaching. Key findings included the regulatory agenda elevating the status of some workers while increasing the precariousness of others, an inability to agree on a local definition of excellence and general confusion, ambivalence and disdain surrounding structural and cultural changes.

This chapter uses the example of the English Teaching Excellence Framework, a relatively new centrally imposed quality framework, to explore “frontline” professional services staff as policy actors. This chapter will use the study’s findings to explore the complex identities, tensions, and workplace dynamics of staff working to implement regulation locally and provide a reflection of the case study methodology used to expose these findings. In its exploration of the complex reality of policy enactment, I hope to encourage institutions to consider local engagement with regulation by repositioning them within institutional discourse as opportunities rather than threats. This study should speak to those that are navigating HE governance and management to meet commanding central regulation.

The paper seeks to deepen the understanding of university lecturers' perceptions of quality.

The paper employs a literature review to establish a robust analytical framework and the use of in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews with a random sample of 20 lecturers in a range of UK universities. The interview data was categorised using the constant comparative method.

The majority of the respondents perceived quality to be largely related to fitness for purpose and accountability rather than transformation. Many respondents made reference to quality assurance or terms associated with it. On the other hand, very few respondents referred to quality enhancement or associated terms.

The research would suggest that enhancement activities in universities need to be developed further and then highlighted as the respondents in this small sample perceived quality to be more about assurance than enhancement. The research would need to be extended to a far greater number of respondents, as at the moment the results are largely illuminative.

Academic development staff should review the impact of their quality initiatives and, if necessary, consider different ways in which they can enhance the quality of the teaching in their universities.

There has been an evaluation of the effect of particular Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund initiatives and the impact of subject reviews, but there has been relatively little consideration of lecturers' perceptions of quality.

A practical inquiry into the best way to introduce quality in an academic context, working through a consultancy approach. Describes the development and refinement of a framework for a consultancy approach to teaching and learning quality enhancement. Outlines future developments and gives an example of a subject area taking on quality for itself and beginning to take independent quality enhancement initiatives.

This paper aims to present recently published resources on information literacy and library instruction through an extensive annotated bibliography of publications covering all library types.

This paper annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2017 in over 200 journals, magazines, books and other sources.

The paper provides a brief description for all 590 sources.

The information may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of accounting students’ attitude on their current knowledge enhancement intention and the moderating role of the learning environment on the attitude-intention relationship. The relationship between current knowledge enhancement intention and level of current knowledge acquired is also investigated.

Copies of a structured questionnaire were randomly distributed to 400 final-year accounting students from three major public universities and 243 completed questionnaires were analyzed.

Attitude is a significant predictor of students’ current knowledge enhancement intention, which, in turn, positively impacts their level of current knowledge. The learning environment significantly moderates the attitude-intention relationship. An inhibiting learning environment tends to accentuate the differences in current knowledge enhancement intention between students with good attitude and those with poor attitude toward current knowledge enhancement.

The study has the limitations often associated with self-administered questionnaire research. The findings also may not be generalizable to other student and current knowledge settings.

There is a need to re-orientate the accounting curriculum design and the accounting academics’ attitude from one that is overly technical focussed to one that emphasizes on other competencies necessary for sustained professional success. Educators and teaching pedagogy that promotes a culture of lifelong learning and current knowledge enhancement among students should be encouraged.

This study fills the gap in the literature by examining the role of the learning environment not as a direct determinant of students’ attitude and their intention, but rather as a moderator of the attitude-intention relationship. The implication is that modifying the learning environment could facilitate or promote development of the desired attitude and hence, intention. The findings of this study support the moderating role of the learning environment in the relationship between current knowledge enhancement attitude and intention of accounting students in Malaysia.

The European Forum for Enhanced Collaboration in Teaching (EFFECT, 2015–2019) (EFFECT, 2019), a project co-financed by the European Commission, through its Erasmus+ programme, has been exploring effective methods for university teachers’ development at the European level, including pedagogical staff development “modules” to support inclusivity and citizenship in teaching and learning practice. Throughout the project and in this chapter, the authors have taken “inclusivity” to convey an attitude and appreciation for principles which inform “inclusion” as a practice – in the context of reflective and reflexive practice the words become largely interchangeable.

The way academic staff teach is of critical importance in any reform designed to enhance inclusion and citizenship in higher education. Conveying these values-related topics in an academic context hardly lends itself to a traditional pedagogical training model. Promoting inclusion means stimulating discussion, challenging stereotypes and unconscious biases, as well as improving educational and social frameworks. The Change Laboratory methodology (Engeström, 2001) was chosen for the pedagogical staff development workshops under EFFECT, with a view to engaging teaching staff in a deeper reflection about the topics and about their teaching practice. Change Laboratory is an intervention-research methodology that aims at reconceptualizing activity: it intends to provoke authentic reactions, responses and disagreements among the participants and provides opportunity for them to work together to reimagine their activities and to identify “concrete” solutions that address persisting issues in their practice. The theory takes a broad conceptualization of “activity” and “practice,” which is not specific to the education sector or the “classroom.” The Change Laboratory is a methodology designed to support the “expansive learning cycle” described by Engeström and as such can be understood as a theory of change which the EFFECT project team applied to a pan-European higher education learning and teaching context.

In 2017, the project team designed and implemented four physical, face-to-face pedagogical staff development workshops on inclusivity and citizenship skills based on this methodology, attended by over 100 participants from across Europe. In 2018, the workshop model was adapted to a virtual learning environment and three online sessions on inclusivity and citizenship skills for higher education teaching staff were offered.

The pedagogical staff development workshops enabled participants to use open reflective questions to provoke discussion about the challenges faced in their own learning and teaching contexts, think about their pedagogical practices and identify their unconscious biases. Most of the participants rated the workshops as very good and innovative, and considered the methodology an effective vehicle for promoting meaningful open discussion.

In this chapter, the authors reflect on the design, implementation and lessons learnt from the pedagogical staff development workshops on inclusivity and citizenship skills. The authors propose a set of recommendations for individual teaching staff and institutional leadership to consider when addressing continuous professional development for inclusivity and citizenship.