Marian Mahat

Assessing Student Engagement and Outcomes: Modelling Insights from Australia and Around the World

AbstractAssessing how students engage and what they know and can do are pressing change frontiers in contemporary higher education. This paper examines large-scale work that has sought to advance the capacity of higher education systems and institutions to engage students through to graduation and ensure they have capabilities required for future study or work. It reviews contexts fuelling the importance of engagement and learning outcomes, reviews two large-scale case studies, and advances a broad model for structuring assessment collaborations that create and deliver new value for higher education. We conclude by discussing implications and opportunities for Chinese higher education and collaborative international partnerships.

Strategic Positioning in Australian Higher Education

The emergence of the concept of strategy in higher education can be traced to the late 1970s and 1980s as American universities, at that time, moved from a “managerial revolution” to an “enterprising evolution” (Thelin, 2004, p. 337). Rooted within the planning school of thought (Ansoff, 1965), higher education’s conception of strategy emphasised its use as a rational tool for orderly, systematic management—as a “disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does, and why it does it” (Bryson, 1988, p. 74).

Strategic Positioning in Higher Education: Reshaping Perspectives

Abstract Key forces shaping higher education drive institutions to make strategic choices to locate themselves in niches where they can make use of their resources effectively and efficiently. However, the concepts of strategy and strategic positioning in higher education are contested issues due to the nature and complexity of the sector and the university. As an industry facing increasing pressure toward marketization and competition, this study calls for an analysis of higher education, as an industry, in a more business-oriented framework. This chapter makes a contribution to scholarly research in higher education by applying Porter’s five forces framework to medical education. In doing so, it provides a foundational perspective on the competitive landscape, its environment, its organizations, and the groups and individuals that make up the higher and medical education sector.

Strategic positioning of medical schools: An Australian perspective

Abstract Key forces shaping medical education drive medical schools to make strategic choices to locate themselves in niches where they can make use of their resources effectively and efficiently. However, the concepts of strategy in higher education are highly contested issues due to the nature and complexity of the sector and the university, more so for medical schools which operate in an ever more regulated environment. Drawing on data from qualitative semi-structured interviews, this paper investigates the notion of strategic positioning in medical education. The broad findings show that medical schools are somewhat bipolar in nature, in that they seemed to position themselves in terms of teaching and learning, and research. The analysis of strategic positions of medical schools has implications at both institutional and systems levels.

The Assessment of Learning Outcomes in Australia: Finding the Holy Grail

Since 2009 there has been increased interest in Australian universities’ ability to demonstrate that their students have acquired knowledge and skills as specified by them in the form of graduate attributes or institutional learning outcomes. This paper describes research undertaken in Australia to identify a comprehensive set of generalized learning outcomes for undergraduate study and a set of criterion-based standards to assist in grading of achievement of those outcomes. It was discovered that although Australian universities document institutional- and course-based learning outcomes for their programs, they generally do not assess students at this level. Instead, the majority of assessment of learning outcomes is at the subject level, and frequently these outcomes do not align well with the course- or institutional-based outcomes that have also been specified. In spite of this, it appears possible to identify generalized assessment tasks for subjects and use constructive alignment between subjects, course curriculum, and chosen course-based learning outcomes, which could be used to reliably measure course outcomes and compare results between universities. These developments are framed in terms of the assessment transparency framework, which provides insight into the current “as-is” situation as well as an indication of what is needed to move learning outcomes assessment toward a fully implemented “ideal” across the higher education sector.