Higher Education Policy and Practice Research Group

Group Info

Members have wide ranging interests, deep expertise and international reputations in wide areas of HE policy and practice, especially:

1. Investigating the student experience: student learning and approaches to learning; development, identity, autonomy
2. Professional academic development and its evaluation
3. HE policy, research, evaluation and methodological study in UK, Europe and Worldwide
4. Disciplinary HE teaching and learning
5. HE practice: students and tutors, retention, support, QE of distance teaching
6. Professional and Work-based learning: its facilitation and evaluation
7. Universities and social change
8. Scholarship of teaching and learning

HEPPRG contains several well established groupings with specialised and high profile expertise:

Centre for Higher Education Research and Information (CHERI)

Humanities in HE Research Group (HERG)

OU Centre for Education in Medicine (OUCEM)

but all have a common interest in establishing, developing, researching and critiquing current and emerging paradigms of learning in HE.

HERG and HEPPRG's international reputation and journal led in 2006 to it being invited by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of University Teaching to become an Institutional Leader of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

See the IET CASTL webpage for details and recent project reports and below for HEPPRG 'Scholarship' publications.

   9.    Appropriate Use of Theory in the Scholarship of Teaching and  Learning as a Strategy for Institutional Development Roxå, Olsson, Mårtensson AHHE 7 (3) 283-302 (2008)

10.     Theory of SoTL Case Studies

• Carnegie Academy for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning team colloquium Price and Parker Indiana 2009
• ISSOTL CASTL team panel ‘capstone’ papers Price and Parker Indiana 2009
• Founding Panel, ISSOTL Special Interest Group for Arts and Humanities Parker Indiana 09
• Carnegie Academy for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning team colloquium Richardson, Price. Vancouver 2008
• University students’ experiences of their teaching-learning environment and their approaches to learning Richardson, keynote. International conference on Pedagogical Research in HE Liverpool 2008
• Is there a Theory of SoTL? Parker. International conference on Pedagogical Research in HE Liverpool 2008
• Theory, Expertise and SoTL – Complex Connections? Parker. International SoTL conference, London 2008
• SoTL and Improving Student Learning Price, Richardson, Parker. Improving Student Learning conference Dublin 2007
• Carnegie Academy for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning team colloquium Price, Richardson, Parker. Dublin 2007
• SoTL Panel Price, Richardson, Parker International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Washington Nov 2006
• Founding Panel, ISSOTL Special Interest Group for History (published as 14, above) Parker Washington Nov 06
• Disseminating Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Journals’ Critical Role Parker plenary speaker. International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Washington Nov 06

Research

HEPPRG is bringing together researchers with complementary interests into new and fruitful collaborations.

Current major projects include:

• Professor John Brennan and Professor John Richardson, ESRC TLRP Phase III: 'What is learned at university: ‘The Social and Organisational Mediation of University Learning (SOMUL)’
• Professor John Brennan PI EUROCORES (European Science Foundation Forward Look programme) EuroHESC Higher Education and Social Change (funding, ESF, 11 million euro)
• Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) Project (2006-9)
  Title: Les écrits à l’université : Inventaires, Pratiques, Modèles
  (Written Texts at the University: Inventories, Practices, Models)
• Carnegie Academy for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (OU International Institutional Leaders) projects 2007-9 for details see: http://www-iet.open.ac.uk/research/castl/index.cfm

OU-led CASTL projects

‘Future Directions for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Internationally':

• Intercultural differences, goals and purposes
• Inter- and cross-disciplinary differences in SoTL
• Theory of SoTL – challenges and opportunities

(Special Issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education: an international journal of theory, research and practice http://ahh.sagepub.com)

Mapping Scholarship

Mapping ‘Excellence’

Collaborative Projects with CASTL partner institutions include:

• Assessing the impact of SoTL;
• Fostering and sustaining SoTL communities of practice;
• Identifying and sharing best practices for peer evaluation/review of teaching;
• Exploring ways to use existing data on student learning such as the US National Survey of Student Experience as a basis for evidence based inquiry into student learning.

Recently completed projects include:

Ongoing Humanities in Higher Education Research Group projects (details at http://iet.open.ac.uk/research/groups/index.cfm?id=6830) include:

• Discipline-specific and domain-wide models of teaching and learning in the Humanities;
• Humanities students' expectations and experiences of study at higher levels, their preparedness for it, attitudes and approaches to it;
• Issues in Humanities HE: eg access, academic, reflective and creative writing, assessment, programme and curricula structures;
• Those teaching methods most conducive to successful study, including interactivity, uses of audio-visual media and computing, conferencing and communications and IT in the humanities;
• The changing structure and role of the Arts/Humanities in higher education, in the context of broader economic, social and educational change within the UK and Europe;
• Relationships between Humanities higher education and graduate employment;
• Writing in the Humanities/writing the Humanities.

Members

Convenors

• Dr Jan Parker
• Professor John Richardson

Core Members

• Professor John Brennan
• Ms Brenda Little
• Mr William Locke
• Dr Janet MacDonald
• Dr Linda Price
• Ms Ruth Williams
• Mr Alan Woodley

Associate Members

• Dr Michael Amoah
• Mrs Alison Ashby
• Dr Barbara Hodgson
• Dr Maki Kimura
• Mr Chris Kubiak
• Ms Mairead Maxted
• Professor Mala Singh

Full-Time Research Students

• Bethany Alden
• Mr David Buck
• Ms Leigh-Anne Perryman

Grants

• Higher Education in Europe Beyond 2010 - Resolving Conflicting Social and Economic Expectations

• EuroHESC Higher Education and Social Change, 2010 and beyond
  Leader Professor John Brennan
  European Science Foundation, 11 million euros 

• The Social and Organisational Mediation of University Learning (SOMUL)
  Professors John Brennan and John Richardson
  ESRC TLRP Phase III: (£0.75M)
    
• The Flexible Professional in the Knowledge Society (REFLEX)
   
• Regional Perspectives on the Role of HEIs in Social Transformation
    
• The Role of Employer Engagement in Course Development and the Difference Employer Engagement Makes (to employers and to students)

   

• Research into Part-time Students' Career Decision-Making: a feasibility study
   
• Higher Education Futures
    
• The Changing Academic Profession: an international study
                
• Higher Education Empirical Research Database (formerly Rolling Research Brief)