Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The early 21^st century is an exciting time, a challenging time for the individuals and institutions engaged in educating people to be responsible and productive participants in all kinds of social institutions, and especially in business organizations. Why are the challenges so great for the education of business professionals and business leaders? There are many answers to this question.

Improvements in information and communication technology (ICT) have allowed greater access to inexpensive information than at any time in the history of mankind. Development of the printing press in 1456 meant that, from about the year 1500 onwards, material contained in documents laboriously created by scribes could be typeset into books made readily available to all who could afford them. Thus, the information doubling period decreased from 1,000 years, prior to this development, to a mere 250 years. The increasing availability of written materials also provided the impetus to improve human literacy, leading to the commensurate development of widespread education systems. Later, development of the telegraph, the wireless radio, and the telephone provided a further increase in information distribution and thus availability, such that by the early 20^th century the information doubling period had decreased from 250 years to less than 100 years. The post-WWII developments of television, Xerox photocopying, and paperback book publication further reduced the postwar information doubling period to a mere 25 years. The advent of computers and the Internet have seen that information doubling period fall to an estimated 10 years in the mid-1990s, with speculation that the next doubling could take as little as 5 years (Gupta, 2000; Editors, 1999).

The contemporary and forecasted economic context is seen as experiencing dynamic change, which requires learning as a continuous endeavor. When confronted with a new context, which requires changing one’s perceptions and behaviors and engaging in ‘new’ learning, people may believe they don’t ‘control’ the change (Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974). Widespread and/or intense contextual change can destroy cultural, social, and/or psychological anchors. Under these conditions, individuals are more likely to continue habituated behaviors and retain biased perceptions because of the need to maintain intellectual and emotional stability. Maintaining a sense of stability is understandable. Stabilizing anchors are necessary if individuals, groups, and communities are to focus their energy on discovering and implementing positive responses to dynamic change (Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974). For the change initiator/facilitator/teacher the issue is how to present and maintain ‘anchors’ that facilitate rather than hinder ‘new’; approaches to, processes of, and objectives for learning. In this chapter, Change Initiator, Facilitator, and Teacher as well as Learner and Student are used interchangeably.

Contemporary Higher Education Institutions (HEI) are confronted with several dilemmas. In this chapter we will discuss two of these dilemmas.

Quality assurance is, among other things, concerned with initiating, maintaining and managing change, but not in a random way. Change that leads to improved quality is directed towards defined goals and undertaken in a systematic way. For this to take place in an organization within higher education there is a need for continuity and expertise. In many universities and other institutions within the higher education sector, Academic Quality Assurance Centers (AQACs) are established with the aim of supporting the academic staff in their pursuit of excellence. AQACs typically track development and research on teaching and learning in higher education and are active in such research and development.

The concept of lifelong learning first came to prominence in the 1970s when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopted it. It was argued that lifelong education should be part of the fundamental policy and underlying concept to be used for the educational policies of both developed and developing countries since it contributed to economic development and equality of opportunity in society.

Concerns about the lack of institutional and collegial support for implementing and sustaining educational innovations have frequently been mentioned in various forums at the annual EDiNEB Conferences. This raises two questions: (1) Is there, in fact, a lack of support for educational innovation? and (2) If so, why is there a lack of support? One possible answer is that these concerns reflect an organizational change process gone awry. However, little seems to have been done to systematically and formally document the educational innovation process from the perspective of managing organizational change, let alone systematically exploring how the change process has gone awry.

In this paper we discuss the potential implications of commonly used student ratings of teacher performance on faculty members’ willingness to pursue innovative educational practices. Our fundamental contention is that student ratings of teaching are potentially detrimental to innovative education. In exploring this fundamental contention, we first examine the inherent evaluation and developmental challenges associated with student ratings. Next, we discuss the common uses, misuses, and abuses of student ratings from both an evaluative perspective and a developmental perspective. We then propose an alternative approach — one based on behaviorally anchored rating scales — for utilizing student ratings. This proposed approach can potentially limit the misuses and abuses of student ratings, and can promote their viability as useful and accepted tools for both evaluative and developmental purposes, especially for the latter. Finally, we conclude the paper with a statement of our beliefs regarding the dangers associated with adhering to a student-as-customer mode of teacher ratings — dangers which can discourage innovative educational efforts and pervert the educational process as well as undermine students’ acquisition of the competencies they will need to function effectively in modern society.

The present society is often considered as a knowledge or learning society in which the continuous advancement of the level of knowledge has become an important political and economic issue (Dijstelbloem & Schuijt, 2002; WRR, 2002). Increasing global competition and technological advancement have a decisive impact on the rate of product innovation in organizations and, by consequence, influence the work environment, the task complexity, and the expected performance of every individual employee. Knowledge and learning, rather than capital, are becoming the main resources of the new global economy in which the use and creation of knowledge are considered as the most important factors for sustained economic growth. Therefore, companies in the global knowledge economy focus on the improvement of their knowledge base and highly value lifelong learning activities. Successful companies are the ones that learn effectively, because they understand that knowledge is becoming their most valuable asset and therefore focus on knowledge creation and knowledge sharing for sustainable economic success (Nonaka, 1991; Davis & Botkin, 1994a, 1994b; Nonaka #x0026; Takeuchi, 1995; De Geus, 1997; Choo, 1998; Drucker, 1999). The business sector has discovered the value of knowledge and their interest in knowledge and learning is growing. In a knowledge society, learning is the key factor for the production and diffusion of knowledge.

“Life-long learning” (OECD, 1996; Van Leeuwen & Van Praag, 2002), the learning organization (Senge, 1991), the organizational knowledge-base (Blackler, 1995; Gherardi, 1996; Von Krogh, Roos, & Kleine, 1998; Pawlowsky, 2001) or effective management of organizational competences and knowledge (Blackler, 1995) are considered as central resources and competitive advantages for all types of organizations as well as for successful individuals. Learning and knowledge management became buzzwords that resulted in a rise, within several disciplines, of publications exploring these activities; this increased level of publication arose within the 1990s and continued in the beginning of the third century (Easterby-Smith, 1997; Easterby-Smith & Araujo, 1999).