This handbook brings together contributors from the United States, Australasia and Europe who use theoretical insights and empirical data to examine current practices as well as possible future directions of postgraduate education. A full range of postgraduate study options are explored, including PhD and professional doctorates, masters awards, and taught coursework programs. The contributions of key stakeholders to the delivery of postgraduate education are addressed, including students, supervisors and university administrators. From this collection, university managers, higher education scholars, and anyone interested in establishing a centre for higher education are given comprehensive overviews of academic leadership, doctoral education, and supervisory relationships. Topics examined in detail in this collection are little discussed in the available literature, including supervisory relationships between colleagues, the emergence of the “second-career academic”, and academic blogging and social networking. The external pressures that universities around the world are experiencing, including neoliberalism, the massification of student numbers, disruptive innovations, and external quality benchmarking, are considered in terms of the ways that they are prompting change in how postgraduate study is administered and delivered. Many chapters contain specific recommendations to meet organisational and student needs, including for specific demographics such as international students or specific programs. The professional, employment, and information literacy needs of students and the professional development of supervisors and processes for examination are also considered.

This book focuses on Indigenous participation in postgraduate education. The collaborating editors, from the contexts of Australian, Canadian and Nordic postgraduate education, have brought together voices of Indigenous postgraduate students and researchers about strategies to support postgraduate education for Indigenous students globally and to promote sustainable solution-focused and change-focused strategies to support Indigenous postgraduate students. The role of higher education institutions in meeting the needs of Indigenous students is considered by contributing scholars, including issues related to postgraduate education pedagogies, flexible learning and technologies. On a more fundamental level the book provides a valuable resource by giving voice to Indigenous postgraduate students themselves who share directly the stories of their experience, their inspirations and difficulties in undertaking postgraduate study. This component of the book gives precedence to the issues most relevant and important to students themselves for consideration by universities and researchers. Bringing the topic and the voices of Indigenous students clearly into the public domain provides a catalyst for discussion of the issues and potential strategies to assist future Indigenous postgraduate students. This book will assist higher education providers to develop understanding of how Indigenous postgraduate students and researchers negotiate research cultures and agendas that permeate higher education from the past to ensure the experience of postgraduate students is both rich in regard to data to be collected and culturally safe in approach; what connections, gaps and contradictions occur at the intersections between past models of postgraduate study and emerging theories around intercultural perspectives, including the impact of cultural and linguistic differences on Indigenous students' learning experiences; how Indigenous students’ and researchers’ personal and professional understandings, beliefs and experiences about what typifies knowledge and research or adds value to postgraduate studies are constructed, shared or challenged; and how higher education institutions manage the potential challenges and risks of developing pedagogies to ensure that they give voice and power to Indigenous postgraduate students.

This text takes a radical look at the nature of adult learning in the postgraduate context and at the implications of this for universities and their courses. While, over recent decades, schools have had to undergo major re-assessments about how learning is developed into curriculum, how learning is delivered to students, and how that learning is assessed, universities have remained very largely detached from these pedagogical/andragogical issues. However, the circumstances of higher education provision have changed. There is also real pressure now from vocationalism. Meeting the Challenges of Change in Postgraduate Education places these movements in both a UK and a wider context examines the nature of learning and teaching in postgraduate education and opens up the debate for rethinking university provision. The book examines concepts such as integration as ways of retaining the higher order skills of a university education over against narrower, technicist approaches and suggest a continuum of provision, but one in which the learner takes centre stage.

This edited volume builds upon the premise that online learning is not separate from the social and material world, and is made up of embodied, socially-meaningful experiences. It is founded on a “postdigital” perspective in which, much more than interactions with keyboards, computer screens, hardware or software, the learning that happens on online postgraduate programmes spills out into professional and informal settings, making connections with what comes before and after any formally-scheduled tasks. Unlike other books relating to online education, this book combines a theoretical perspective, in which the digital, physical and social are all interconnected within complex educational ecologies, with a focus grounded in postgraduate practice. This focus has important implications for the kinds of students and learning that are explored in the chapters of the book. This book provides an important contribution to the knowledge of what is required to produce quality, online postgraduate programmes at the level of teachers, curriculum designers, faculty developers and policy-makers.

This text is designed to respond to the uppermost area of concern in postgraduate education today - that of achieving quality. The book discusses issues of quality and research culture, including criteria for evaluating theses and research applications, and women and overseas students.

There is a growing demand for educational professionals to develop a more critical understanding of the key and emerging debates in education so that they can better meet the challenges and demands placed upon them. Exploring Education at Postgraduate Level represents a range of perspectives from educational experts to academic researchers, and highlights the key issues surrounding contemporary education. Organised into three parts and drawing on key issues in education theory, policy and practice, the book considers areas such as SEN, evaluating learning, ESOL and gender. Featuring reflective questions, case studies and summaries of core ideas, the chapters include: Troublesome learning journey; Applying educational thinkers to contemporary educational practice; Values production through social and emotional learning; Policy research: In defence ad hocery?; We are all critically reflective now: The politics of critical reflection in higher education and in the work place; Developing critical thought about SEN; The refuge of relativism. Aimed at supporting students on Masters-level courses, this acessible but critically provocative text is an essential resource for those wishing to develop a more critical understanding of the role, purpose and function of educational systems and practices.

Forging closer links between university research and teaching has become an important way to enhance the quality of higher education across the world. As student engagement takes centre stage in academic life, how can academics and university leaders engage with their students to connect research and teaching more effectively? In this highly accessible book, the contributors show how students and academics can work in partnership to shape research-based education. Featuring student perspectives, it offers academics and university leaders practical suggestions and inspiring ideas on higher education pedagogy, including principles of working with students as partners in higher education, connecting students with real-world outputs, transcending disciplinary boundaries in student research activities, connecting students with the workplace, and innovative assessment and teaching practices. Written and edited in full collaboration with students and leading educator-researchers from a wide spectrum of academic disciplines, this book poses fundamental questions about learning and learning communities in contemporary higher education.

Global massification of postsecondary education, with more than 200 million students studying at an untold number of institutions focusing on every specialization possible, necessitates a differentiated system of postsecondary education in every country. This book provides the first comparative study of how postsecondary education has evolved in 13 countries. The study offers an analysis of current global realities and how different nations have constructed their response. Our research shows that few countries have developed rational and differentiated academic systems to meet new realities. The book provides insights regarding useful approaches for the development of academic systems. The book reveals similarities and differences in the 13 case studies as different governments have expanded postsecondary education to respond to the massification of enrollment. Postsecondary education has become diversified, but for the most part not adequately differentiated in most countries. Several of the case studies underscore the challenge of sustaining differentiation within the system if credentials from non-university, postsecondary institutions are considered of lesser social status. Too often institutions that successfully address the practical needs of national economies are ultimately merged into the university system. There is an urgent need for the planning and structuring of coherent systems of postsecondary education to serve the increasingly diverse clientele in need of the skills required by the knowledge economy. This study is the first global analysis aimed at understanding how post-secondary education can be organized to meet society’s requirements and points to the need for designing coherent academic systems.

Originally published in 1975 The Highest Education is the first thorough study of the growth of students at British universities from the 1940s to 1975, particularly in the field of postgraduate study. The book reviews the history of graduate education in Britain and evaluates the purpose of postgraduate study. It looks at research students in the context of university, and the world at large, and discusses the different needs of full-time and part-time students. The book addresses the conflicts between student aims and that of the university staff, and discusses how far universities make adequate provision for their graduate students and how their studies are supervised. The additionally book looks at students’ finances and examines the policies and costs which are involved in higher education institutions.

Is it possible to bring university research and student education into a more connected, more symbiotic relationship? If so, can we develop programmes of study that enable faculty, students and ‘real world’ communities to connect in new ways? In this accessible book, Dilly Fung argues that it is not only possible but also potentially transformational to develop new forms of research-based education. Presenting the Connected Curriculum framework already adopted by UCL, she opens windows onto new initiatives related to, for example, research-based education, internationalisation, the global classroom, interdisciplinarity and public engagement. A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education is, however, not just about developing engaging programmes of study. Drawing on the field of philosophical hermeneutics, Fung argues how the Connected Curriculum framework can help to create spaces for critical dialogue about educational values, both within and across existing research groups, teaching departments and learning communities. Drawing on vignettes of practice from around the world, she argues that developing the synergies between research and education can empower faculty members and students from all backgrounds to contribute to the global common good.