Teaching Insights

Referencing is a fundamental element of academic writing, but referencing errors among students have become an issue of considerable concern. Here, Chinny Nzekwe-Excel, learning development adviser with the Centre for Learning Innovation and Professional Practice, Aston University, Birmingham, UK, discusses how the adoption of a consistent format for using the Harvard referencing style can encourage students to develop their referencing skills, and proposes how this can be achieved. This article is available to view without subscription.

This article looks at a range of admissions policies from different parts of the world and finds that practice differs widely according to country and institution. Thus the community college may seek to broaden access by having two entry points at different times in the year, with a programme for late entrants, while a couple of miles away on the other side of the tracks, an elite university requires high-school grades and entrance test scores and indications of leadership qualities. However, there are common threads: a belief that the admissions process should be fair and transparent, that entrants should be judged by criteria that indicate future academic success and employability, and that strenuous efforts should be made to represent different ethnic, social and age groups. That being the case, we should have a diverse workforce capable of critical thinking and contributing to a global knowledge economy.

Assessment has a broader purpose than merely to pass judgement on a student's performance: it should communicate the standard expected so that this can be internalized. Then learning can become not just a race to the finishing post, but a personal commitment to those values of judgement, critical analysis and independence of thought which should characterize academic life. In this article, Margaret Adolphus looks at the ways in which educationalists have been trying to influence the assessment agenda and ensure that it reflects authentic academic achievement.

Howard Thomas is internationally recognized as a leading expert in the field of strategic management, with over 30 books and 200 articles to his name. He is also dean of Warwick Business School (WBS), recently nominated as one of the top ten European Business Schools. He talks to Margaret Adolphus about WBS, management education, the responsibility of business schools in the current financial crisis, and his role as consulting editor of Emerald's Journal of Strategy and Management.

In the 21st century, few universities see themselves as solely imparting knowledge. A key aim is that students should leave with skills employers will find attractive. In the UK particularly, employability is seen as the key to competitiveness. So, what about a university degree that does not merely foster employability skills, but also future employers? Such a place can be found in the midst of the lakes and forests of Finland – Team Academy or Tiimiakatemia, to give it its Finnish name – described by management guru and organizational theorist Peter Senge as "the future of management education".

This article explores some of the ways in which universities are working with business, concentrating specifically on such issues as executive development, tailored courses and knowledge transfer. The equally important issue of ensuring that management degree courses are relevant to the business world is explored in the Teaching insight: Involving business in management education.

E-learning 2.0 is a term coined for the application of Web 2.0 technologies to e-learning. It uses applications which allow the learner to create content, paralleling the changing nature of the Internet from a one-way to a two-way/many-way flow of information. This article looks at the main technologies involved and the pedagogies that are beginning to emerge to support their effective use. It ends with a case study on Emerald's own use of the medium.

There is widespread global concern about students who start, but fail to complete, a degree programme. Retention has been a major issue since the 1970s, but despite a considerable amount of money spent and programmes developed, things have got little better. The problem is such that many universities have developed their own programmes aimed at retention, which this article explores.

All over the world, women form a high proportion of students, but are under-represented in academic leadership positions. This article looks at some global trends for women in academic leadership, drawing particularly on examples from the UK, North America, Australia, South Africa and Turkey.

Inquiry-, or enquiry-, based learning is an approach which assumes that learning happens most readily through discovery guided by mentoring, rather than through transmission of information. It has been fuelled by recent interest in active learning approaches, and by a concern to deepen the research input into teaching. In this guide we look first at some definitions of the term before considering where and how it is used, including its links with problem-based learning, research, group work and networked learning, and how it can best be supported by the tutor.

Management education should be at least partly about educating future or, in the case of executive education, current managers. In order to do this, business schools need to form close links with business, and most stress their links with the business community and claim to offer their students "real world" in addition to academic learning. This article looks at some of the ways in which business schools involve real world business in management education, and at the theoretical underpinning behind practical education.

PowerPoint is a deceptively easy application to use. Deceptive, that is, because it is so easy to use badly, as anyone who has stumbled from a presentation in a confused blur with their head reeling and their eyes spinning will know only too well. For anyone still wary of unleashing this powerful yet disruptive force upon their classrooms, here is a short guide to making the most out of PowerPoint in lectures.

Academic ethics is an umbrella concept which encompasses many issues. On an institutional level, there is much discussion about the nature of a university, and whether it is affected by the commercial pressures to get more students (paying or paid for), whether business/university partnerships affect academic freedom, and what type of investments it is appropriate for a university to have. On an individual level, the main focus of discussion in recent years has been on academic integrity, and the need to maintain a culture of honesty in all aspects of teaching and research.

The production of a piece of research is what characterizes academic education and differentiates it from vocational training. Students are expected to demonstrate scholarly academic standards in the form of careful and accurate collection of evidence, from which they draw relevant and considered conclusions.

How do students learn? There's been a great deal of interest in this question over the past 40 or so years. In a number of countries, including the UK, it has a particular relevance as universities open their doors to a wider range of abilities. Do people learn in the same way? It's generally accepted that they do not, and that many factors affect learning – hence the interest in learning 'styles'.

Distance learning is normally defined as a form of learning which takes place away from the campus, where the university in some media form comes to the student rather than the student coming to the university. It is not the same as e-learning, which refers to the use of technology rather than separation of teacher and taught. Many universities are now offering distance learning in some form but what does that mean for teachers and other academic support staff?

E-learning is now growing from unruly adolescence into maturity. It is used to teach a wide range of subjects from Anglo Saxon to Artificial Intelligence. It is no longer bedeviled by the high production values of early days which made it uneconomic, and emphasis on re-use means less reinvention of the wheel.

The outcomes-based approach to teaching and learning is increasingly being used in higher education as the model for best practice in constructing courses and evaluating students' work. Learn more about this approach with this simple, practical guide to building your own outcomes-based programmes.

Corporations that put man before money outperform businesses whose primary goal is to make money. In high-performing, value-based organizations the first priority is on securing the well-being of the associates. The superior performance of value-based management includes substantially less absenteeism and less turnover, more innovation, and higher profit and return on investment.

The thought of planning a lecture, let alone a whole course, can seem a huge hurdle to overcome. How will you use all that time? How will you fit in everything you need to say? This article shows how a number of changes have taken place in tertiary education, so that universities have more stakeholders than their own concept of a liberal education.

For the chattering classes of higher education, the lecture is out, and active, self-managed learning is in. But what does this mean, and what are the implications for teaching? In this article, we look at some definitions of active/self-managed learning/learning-centred approach, and then at the implications of this for the skillset of the university teacher. Finally, we describe some methods which teachers have used.