Practical implications

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This section outlines, rearranges, and integrates the practical recommendations that researchers of tertiary education have suggested.  To generate this information, we searched phrases, such as practical implications, in all journals that are relevant to tertiary education.  These journals include Higher Education Quarterly, Higher Education Research and Development, Innovative Higher Education, Internet and Higher Education, Journal of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, Studies in Higher Education, and Teaching in Higher Education.  Once we accumulate enough of these practical implications, we will arrange these suggestions under each of the main topics of this webpage.

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Pathways to university

• Whenever possible, education institutions and state governments should facilitate dual enrolments—in which students complete study at a high school and a tertiary education institution, such as a college in the US or a TAFE in Australia, concurrently.  Furthermore, institutions and governments should promote these opportunities to students whose families had not studied in tertiary education institutions before.  These dual enrolments have been shown to increase the likelihood that students will complete their studies, especially if their families earn low incomes or had not studied in tertiary education institutions before (Lee et al., 2022).  

 

Recruitment of students

• Tertiary education institutions often engage agents to recruit international students.  Occasionally, agents will disseminate false information, behave unprofessionally, disclose sensitive information, or engage in financial misconduct. To prevent these problems, for each agent, institutions often assess the suitability, retention, and GPA of all applicants and observe agents in practice.  Because of some limitations in these traditional practices, institutions should also engage mystery shoppers who pose as potential students, survey applicants and students about their experience with agents, as well as audit the brochures, websites, or other marketing paraphernalia that agents utilize.  Furthermore, when communicating with each agent, staff at these institutions should not merely impart knowledge and instructions but seek the advice and perspectives of these agents.  That is, bi-directional communication is more likely to uncover shortcomings and complications (Nikula & Kivistö, 2020). 

• Although not mandated in all nations, to disseminate knowledge and information to agents, institutions should not merely send a few weblinks but should introduce online modules, coupled with assessments, to assess outcomes. In addition, before they select agents, institutions should conduct due diligence, such as reference checks, criminal record checks, and language certificates. Finally, institutions should disclose the roles and responsibilities of agents to promote transparency and to enable applicants to gauge whether the agents have acted inappropriately (Nikula, 2022).

• Individuals are more likely to pursue graduate studies, especially graduate research including PhDs, if they feel passionate about research.  To foster this passion in undergraduate classes, institutions should arrange many research experiences, such as journal clubs, research posters, seminar series, vacation research projects, or lectures from postgraduate students.  The lecturers often discuss their research in class, explain the impact of this research, exhibit passion about this research, and refer to the latest advances in research methods.  These experiences underpin many of the motivations that inspire prospective graduate researchers to apply (Guerin et al., 2015).

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Admission and enrolment

• Institutions should disseminate accurate information, on the web and other platforms, about each unit, class, or course as early as possible—months before students need to enroll.  For example, this information could outline the skills that students will acquire and the benefits of these skills, the teaching style or activities, samples of the assessment tasks, the pre-requisites, feedback from past students, and the schedule of classes.  At many tertiary education institutions, this information is inaccessible or delayed, especially after first year.  Consequently, many students enroll in more classes than necessary and then withdraw after a couple of weeks, called academic shopping (Scott & Savage, 2022)

• To optimize decisions about which applicants should be admitted, each institution should regularly determine the predictors of which students are likely to complete their course and succeed, perhaps using ordered logit and generalized ordered logit estimators. Cyrenne and Chan (2022) revealed, for example, how first year GPA and fulltime study were key determinants of student performance, whereas the high school that students attended was not significantly related to student performance.  Although these analyses should be straightforward and ubiquitous, many universities retain the characteristics of applicants and the performance of students in separate repositories or datasets.  Instead, universities should integrate these datasets seamlessly.  In addition, to optimize these predictions, universities should retain as many characteristics of applicants as legally and logistically possible.    

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Teaching approaches

• Teachers should apply an approach, called mixed assignments.  Specifically, when the assignment demands careful and extensive contemplation, the workload should be modest.  For example, the task should be short rather than extensive.  In addition, students should be granted the opportunity to choose assignments, from several alternatives, that are most relevant to their lives or aspirations. When the assignment is simpler, the workload could be increased. Students tend to contemplate a topic more carefully, rather than merely learn superficially, when they feel their workload is manageable and the topic is interesting (Smarandache, et al., 2022). 

• To design a suitable blend of asynchronous and synchronous activities, educators could first measure the preferences of each cohort.  Students might answer questions around the degree to which they like to control the pace of their learning, would like to be able to access these learning materials indefinitely, and value collaboration, support, exchange of knowledge, and other positive features of interactions.  If most of the students like to control the pace of their learning and would like to be able to access these learning materials indefinitely, most of the learning materials should be available asynchronously—such as videos of past classes that students can watch any time. If most of the students value the collaboration, support, exchange of knowledge, and other positive features of interactions, the educator should encourage students to attend more synchronous activities, such as live online classes.  Nevertheless, whenever possible, students should be granted significance choice over the degree to which they can learn the materials asynchronously or synchronously, because learning preferences vary appreciably across these students (Beyth-Marom et al., 2005). 

 

Assessment approaches

• Occasionally, teachers should organize PechaKucha Presentations—a variation to standard Powerpoint presentations (Ave et al., 2020).  These presentations comprise 20 slides.  Each slide appears for 20 seconds only and usually comprises a picture and few if any words.  Therefore, the teacher must convey the information, usually in the format of a story, succinctly. These presentations tend to be more engaging than standard formats and equally likely to promote the retention of material.  Usually students, but occasionally teachers, could apply this format.    

• In many classes, students need to complete ePortfolios as part of their assessment.  According to some educators, ePortfolios may be more effective if staff also maintained and thus modeled ePortfolios as well (Kirby et al., 2022).  That is, according to these participants, if staff do not use these ePortfolios, several problems might unfold.  First, staff might not be able to help students create these ePortfolios effectively.  Second, students may be more likely to doubt the benefits of this platform. 

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Feedback to students

• After completing an assignment in one or more courses, students should first read the work of three peers and construct some helpful comments to improve these assignments—after receiving guidance on how to evaluate these assignments. This activity enhances the capacity of students to evaluate work and to understand the nuances in the criteria.   Second, the students should receive the feedback on their own assignment from three peers.  Then, the students should produce an audio file, perhaps in WhatsApp, in which they consider this feedback, identify the strengths and limitations of their assignment, and contemplate how they could respond to the concerns that were raised. These audio files should last two to five minutes. Finally, perhaps also in WhatsApp, the teacher should record an audio file in which they evaluate this recording.  For example, the teacher might approve some of the comments of students as well as identifies problems the student might have overlooked.  This approach increases the degree to which students embrace, rather than reject, feedback on assignments (To, 2022) 

 

Work integrated learning

• Occasionally, institutions arrange electronic work integrated learning, in which students complete placements and internships remotely.  To enhance the benefits of these opportunities, institutions should apply some principles that might not be as relevant to traditional work integrated learning.  For example, to match the preferences of students, the institution should utilize technologies that are common in workplaces today, such as Zoom instead of Second Life.  In addition, students should be granted more time socialize and interact with their industry mentors and colleagues—in person, if possible.  In addition, institutions should arrange technologies, such as mobile apps and alerts, that expedite communication, enabling the individuals to receive immediate updates. Yet, these technologies, such as mobile apps, should be compatible with the other technology platforms, including the learning management system (Glavas & Schuster, 2020).

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Communication platforms

• Tertiary education institutions that offer courses that are lower in rank than a Bachelor degree, such as Colleges in the US or TAFES in Australia, should consider introducing a texting platform that is designed to engage students.  The platform should communicate automated responses to frequently asked questions from students as well as personalized responses form academic advisors if needed.  For example, some of the text messages prompted students to arrange an appointment with a relevant advisor, register to attend useful programs, submit a scholarship application, and so forth.  Text messages should be sent once a week, especially during the first semester in which students are enrolled. The text messages should also include some personalized information, relevant to each individual or major, such as the preferred name of each student and a photograph of the advisor sending the texts.  This platform enhances the persistence of students who have recently enrolled and experiencing various impediments (Tippetts et al., 2022)

 

Support of students

• Tertiary education institutions should offer programs that assist students who had experienced significant adversity during their childhood.  These students should be able to access trauma-informed care—care programs that diverge from typical mental health programs.  Otherwise, students who had experienced significant adversity during their childhood, such as violence in the home, are not as likely as their peers to complete their course (Lecy & Osteen, 2022)

• Institutions should arrange opportunities, outside formal workshops, that encourage academics and students to discuss a range of topics collaboratively—especially around topics in which they disagree. During these discussions, each person should genuinely listen to the political, social, or religious opinions and consider the merits of opinions that differ from their own position.  Academics should also discuss with students their intended careers and the importance of these careers to society.  When academics demonstrate this respect towards diversity perspectives, students are naturally more inclined to embrace diversity perspectives as well—a central goal of many tertiary institutions (Trolian & Parker, 2022)

• In some courses, students and staff should attend several multicultural events, during the evening, outside the university grounds.  During these events, international students should be granted opportunities to share cultural experiences that epitomize their home country.  Staff and students can then share cultural stories, traditions, beliefs, and foods. The organizers should help students and staff prepare stories and perspectives that are engaging, surprising, and relevant to the course. After students attend these experiences with peers and academics, they experience a greater sense of belonging.  Their academic experience and motivation during the course thus improves as well (De Sisto et al., 2022).

 

Support of research candidates

• Universities and other research institutions obviously need to demonstrate how they genuinely support the wellbeing and development of academics—rather than only celebrate their achievements and productivity.  Rather than merely articulate these values, institutions need to translate this plan into tangible and sustainable actions.  More importantly, PhD and other research candidates need to be informed about these values and actions. That is, research candidates tend to experience greater mental wellbeing whenever they feel their supervisors and other academics feel supported rather than inundated with duties and pressure (Ryan et al., 2022)

• Research candidates, such as PhD students, should be encouraged to monitor their progress, recognize their progress, and granted tools to forge a sense of progress—a key determinant of wellbeing (Prieto et al., 2022).  For example, they could attend workshops that first discuss the importance of this sense of progress as well as techniques to monitor this sense of progress—such as journaling and personal measures.  Participants should brainstorm various measures they could record to gauge progress, such as number of articles read, number of limitations resolved, number of words written, and so forth.  To illustrate, they could, collectively, stipulate a range of skills they need to learn—and regard the acquisition of these skills as a measure of progress.  The workshops should also include exercises and discussions around common obstacles to progress and how to manage these obstacles.

• Supervisors should prompt candidates to submit drafts of their work regularly, even if only a few paragraphs.  Then, supervisors should correct some of this work during meetings with candidates.  While correcting the work, supervisors should frequently praise the progress of their candidates, such as improvements in specific writing skills and so forth.  These practices may instill confidence in candidates and diminish the appeal of contract cheating (Kelly & Stevenson, 2021).

• Supervisors should recognize the typical challenges that candidates experience—such as threats to their confidence, anxiety about their research, feelings of isolation, and uncertainty about their identity—and explicitly describe these possibilities to students.  Second, supervisors should learn to foster a state of mindfulness, in which they feel genuine interest towards the experiences, perspectives, and concerns of students, demonstrate warmth and compassion towards these experiences without judgment, and foster an authentic, collaborative relationship.  Rather than merely comply with duties, supervisors should be granted more opportunities to discuss with one another how they develop these qualities.  Supervisors who naturally demonstrate these qualities are perceived as the most supportive, enhancing the confidence of students (Buirski, 2022).

 

Resilience programs

• Tertiary education institution should embed activities and materials in the curriculum that enhance the resilience of students.  Specifically, this content should cover self-awareness—awareness of strengths, recognition these qualities are modifiable, and attempts to clarify aspirations and seek meaning—self—regulation of emotions—such as mindfulness, CBT, and effective coping styles—self-determination—such as aligning tasks to personal aspirations—and self-care—such as the importance of recreation, physical activities, and work-life balance.  In addition, the curriculum should cover social connections, such as relationship development and mentoring, as well as collaborations, such as conflict management, teamwork, and learning communities.  Students should be granted opportunities to develop these competencies across four stages.  Specifically, they should learn the principles, develop these capabilities, adapt and integrate these strategies, and apply these strategies to the workplace.  Students should feel they can contribute to the design of these courses and feel valued regardless of their limitations  (Van Kessel et al. 2022)

 

Productivity programs

• Tertiary education institutions frequently organize short workshops or disseminate materials on how staff can work more effectively and manage their time better.  However, to help staff manage their workload better, some researchers have shown that more comprehensive programs may be more effective—in which individuals attend four webinars that each last 90 minutes each, use a tool, such as Toggl, to monitor the time they devote to all work tasks, and record all work requests over a month. In these webinars, participants discuss insights from these analyses. They might, for example, learn that time is often squandered by inessential tasks, interruptions, or frequent email checks.  During the workshops, they might list work requests they will always accept or refuse, create templates in response to standard requests, such as how to refuse requests effectively, and learn over ten time-management strategies that have been substantiated empirically, such as reading emails only three times a day.  They might learn to pause before they respond to request to optimize responses or to record their two or three key priorities on a post-it note—and attach this post-it note to their computer screen to prevent unnecessary distractions (Culpepper et al., 2019). 

• Tertiary education institutions should introduce a range of initiatives and practices to encourage staff to share knowledge, information, and insights with one another—both within and across teams.  For example, the institutions can establish a repository in which staff can share information about recent opportunities, research, or personal insights. Other staff can also tag, organize, and integrate this information to facilitate use and access.  To encourage staff to contribute to this repository, level of contribution—as measured by number of likes or other metrics—may be recognized in promotion applications and performance development plans. Knowledge sharing enhances the innovation and performance of teams and institutions (e.g., Lo & Tian, 2020)

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Recruitment and selection of staff

• When choosing academic staff, universities should generally prefer applicants who completed their doctoral studies or some academic research at other institutions.  If most academic staff completed their doctorates at the university, called doctoral inbreeding, they are not as likely to publish in good journals or attract many citations (Karadag & Ciftci, 2022)

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Training of staff

• To design effective leadership development programs at tertiary education institutions, the relevant staff first need to conduct research to ascertain the topics that are simultaneously relevant to the career aspirations of leaders as well as the priorities and values of the institution. Second, the program should not merely develop the capabilities of individual leaders but help these leaders influence and disseminate the insights they acquire to other stakeholders, called distributed leadership.  Third, the programs should invoke the social science literature on how facilitators can help embed the insights they disseminate into the work environment—perhaps with action learning projects, coaching of individuals or small groups, and other forums to discuss and to apply the material.  Fourth, the relevant staff should utilize various tools to arrange the programs immediately before the critical moments that leaders in various roles may experience.  For example, if leaders are promoted to a role in which they may need to overcome resistance to change, the training on this topic should be available at this time (Dopson et al., 2019).

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Support of staff

• Whenever institutions want to introduce a wholesale change to teaching practices, such as instill online and blended learning into every course, they need to accommodate the challenges, experiences, and needs of both students and staff.   That is, they need to demonstrate an ethic of care rather than a bureaucratic orientation; otherwise, these changes provoke resistance.  To achieve this goal, the approach should prioritize conversation—opportunities that enable staff to discuss with one another and students how they can apply their creativity and skills to accommodate the distinct needs and challenges of diverse individuals.  Staff need to be granted significant time to introduce these changes and choices over the degree to which they apply these practices.  The institution should prioritize conversation and creativity over forms in which staff need to tick boxes (Huang et al., 2022).   

• Staff, especially junior academics, should complete a survey in which they are invited to indicate which of their tasks should perhaps be assigned to someone else or discarded altogether. A team should then meet to minimize the degree to which junior academics complete these tasks—or justify why these tasks might benefit their future.  When junior academics feel the complete tasks that should be assigned to someone else, sometimes called illegitimate tasks, they are more likely to feel overloaded, experience burnout, and leave academia (Bramlage et al., 2021)

• To operate inclusively and to support diverse staff, many institutions produce reports on whether the selection, evaluation, and promotion of staff depends on demographics, such as gender or ethnicity.  However, as research shows, the effects of these demographics tend to vary markedly across disciplines (Durodoye et al., 2020).  Therefore, these reports should explore the effects of gender, ethnicity, and other demographics on the selection, evaluation, and promotion of staff in each discipline separately and perhaps at each level.  Then, whenever possible bias is detected, the institution should explore the perspectives and experience of staff in these specific disciplines.

 

Support of teaching academics

• Many universities employ teaching academics—academics whose role primarily, or even solely, revolves around teaching rather than research.  Many of these individuals, however, feel dissatisfied in these roles and may leave the institution because of limited status, few opportunities to receive promotions, and uncertainty about their role and career path.  To address these concerns, HR professionals, with the support of senior executives, should introduce a range of initiatives that shift the culture and attitudes towards these teaching academics.  For example, these institutions should employ or promote a couple of teaching academics to very senior positions, to develop role models that could inspire and assist other teaching academics. They should clarify the metrics and measures these staff could utilize to establish teaching excellence and receive promotions.  These institutions should then develop scripts or templates that delineate some career paths that might suit teaching academics.  Finally, these institutions must officially grant these staff generous time to engage in research, scholarship, and development—around pedagogy, the discipline of these academics, or both (Bennett et al., 2018).

• At universities, the role of teaching academics—that is, academics who conduct limited research—should be to help colleagues in their discipline to teach more effectively.  That is, heads of departments should grant these individuals the time and opportunities to develop expertise in pedagogy, teaching, and learning in their field and to apply this expertise to improve the teaching practices of other academics in their department.  These teaching academics will thus be perceived as specialists in pedagogy, but also as academics, because their activities utilize their extensive knowledge of their academic discipline. 

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Staff promotions and awards

• Many academics, especially women, believe their academic record warrants a promotion, but they do not apply to seek this promotion.  Specifically, they often do not apply because of the previous attempts were traumatic and, therefore, these applications elicit marked anxiety.  Other academics do not apply because family and other responsibilities limit the time they can dedicate to this application.  Finally, the promotion criteria often disadvantage specific demographics, such as women, who often fulfil more service and student demands than men, compromising their research output—a key determinant of promotions (Bowering & Reed, 2021).  Therefore, academics should be able to answer simple questions, over time, to develop their application.  If applications are rejected, academics should receive specific advice on the tasks they could complete to be promoted in the future—to diminish the disappointment of these rejections.  And criteria should weight university service and other activities to a greater extent relative to research

• To overcome some of the observed complications of teaching awards—such as resentment and cynicism—more awards should recognize teams rather than individuals, to promote collaboration and knowledge exchange about teaching.  Similarly, more awards should recognize academics who mentor peers or share knowledge and resources about teaching.  During awards nights, individuals should be granted more opportunities to share insights on innovative and exemplary teaching practices, because the audience often feel motivated to improve their teaching at this time.  The emphasis of these awards nights should be to celebrate the role of teaching and innovation rather than to boost the ego of some academics to the detriment of everyone else.  Likewise, staff who receive awards should be granted opportunities to mentor colleagues--but should not feel obliged to assume this role, because otherwise awards are perceived as a source of elevated workload, unreasonable expectations, and increased pressure. Although tertiary education institutions must reward staff who excel in teaching. such as increase the degree to which student satisfaction and learning is considered in promotion applications, they should not accompany teaching awards with major financial benefits; otherwise, the awards can become too contentious and divisive (Seppala & Smith, 2020).

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Research training: general

• When training graduate researchers and early career researchers, many instructors attempt to impart knowledge about research methods.  However, research methods vary appreciably across academic disciplines, paradigms, and methodologies.  Instead, instructors should often impart knowledge about mental tools—that is, how researchers should think about research.  For example, researchers should develop a research question that is broad enough to enable flexibility and exploration but sufficiently confined to delimit the study.  Second, researchers should consider maintain an inventory of the past assumptions of previous scholars on this topic.  To identify these assumptions, consider how past findings might have been different if the circumstances were changed, such as the time of year, location, and so forth.  Third, researchers should ascertain which of these assumptions are robust.  Fourth, researchers should learn how to translate their research into stories—stories that prioritize the key features but include enough details to enable listeners or readers to appreciate the context or setting, and so forth (Madden, 2022).  Discussion of these mental tools is relevant to more researchers than many discussions about research methods.

• During induction programs—or even during workshops before enrolment, designed to attract or to assist potential graduate researchers—facilitators should outline some of the challenges of graduate degrees, such as a PhD.  For example, these facilitators might refer to complications that often unfold around writing, recruitment of participants, failed experiments, disagreements with supervisors, inaccessible supervisors, financial pressures, feelings of isolation, uncertainty about future careers, and so forth.  The facilitators should then indicate some avenues that graduates researchers can explore to address these concerns.  If this information is not presented at this time, the expectations and hopes of candidates are often dashed—one of the key determinants of candidate dissatisfaction (Holbrook et al., 2014).

• Graduate researchers, and perhaps early career researchers more broadly, should receive training about the T shaped approach—representing a blend of expertise about one topic and familiarity with many topics—to develop their entrepreneurial skills and ultimately their confidence with their career (Rippa et al., 2022).   First, during this training, participants should learn about innovation business models—that is, the various pathways that transform intellectual knowledge, such as a scientific discovery, into a commercial asset.  Second, participants should learn about how they can use copyright, patent, and trademark to protect and to utilize their intellectual knowledge.  Third, participants should learn about how to navigate the transformation of intellectual knowledge to commercial opportunities—such as how to manage this knowledge before they submit a patent application, how to submit a patent application, and how to establish an academic spin-off.  Finally, participants should be exposed to detailed case studies of academic spin-offs or other avenues, preferably owned by alumni of the university.  

• Many tertiary education institutions offer training courses that are designed to help students complete a PhD thesis in the future—such as an Honors program, a Graduate Diploma in Research, or a sequence of classes at the start of a doctorate.  These courses should not only impart research skills but also help these students on a variety of other capabilities that universities prioritize.  For example, these courses should help students learn to collaborate in research teams effectively, to work independently, to maintain discipline, to negotiate effectively, to embrace diverse cultures, to withstand stress, to write professionally, to speak convincingly, to tailor their communication to the audience, as well as to use digital tools to analyze data, present data, and access information. As Mantai and Marrone (2022) distilled from an analysis of over 13 000 advertisements to attract PhD candidates, universities seek individuals who demonstrate these qualities, suggesting these characteristics are valuable to the role.   

 

Research training: Writing

• To enhance the writing capability of graduate researchers, the institution should inspire these individuals to commit to a plan on how they will develop their writing skills gradually over time.  For instance, in the few months, supervisors could read drafts of various paragraphs, such as a brief literature review, and then enumerate some of the writing skills and principles that candidates should learn.  For example, candidates might need to learn how to prevent ambiguous pronouns or confine paragraphs to a more specific premise.  The supervisor could then recommend some writing guidelines or principles that candidates could develop.  Candidates should maintain a journal or record of the skills they have developed after both reading these guidelines and responding to the feedback of supervisors. This journal, for example, might include a taxonomy of paragraph types and lists of words or phrases they could use in the future.  This approach is vital, because candidates who perceive writing as a skill to develop respond more effectively to feedback—the key determinant of writing ability in graduate researchers (Holzweiss, 2022). 

• When supervisors read the drafts of their PhD candidates or other graduate researchers, they often experience a tension between the need to deliver extensive, critical feedback and the need to deliver prompt, limited feedback.  Extensive feedback is more likely to enhance the writing skills of these candidates and to improve the thesis.  Yet, this extensive feedback also consumes substantial time and may elicit a defensive response in candidates (Carter & Kumar, 2017).  To navigate these tensions, supervisors should organize communities of practices in which several candidates, together with interested academics, read drafts and discuss possible improvements (Carter & Kumar, 2017).  That is, supervisors should inspire candidates to seek feedback and suggestions from peers and perhaps other academics as well.  In addition, supervisors should attempt to teach candidates one principle at a time—such as how to write topic sentences, circumvent ambiguous pronouns, or use punctuation correctly.  To consolidate these insights, the candidates should apply this principle to correct their previous drafts.  Finally, the feedback of supervisors should not only correct errors but also praise sentences that were written proficiently.  Praise can also reinforce suitable practices.      

• Institutions should dedicate some funding to support peer writing groups—groups in which graduate researchers meet outside hours, perhaps on a Saturday, every fortnight or so, to write.  In particular, the institution should provide lunch as well as an extensive space.  The space should enable candidates to write individually as well as discuss their work collectively.  These experiences tend to enhance the writing, progress, and wellbeing of these candidates (Beasy et al., 2020).

• Institutions should also encourage graduate researchers who study remotely to establish online writing groups.  These groups could meet over videoconference once every week or fortnight, perhaps lasting one or two hours.  During each session, the graduate researchers would review and discuss the draft that one candidate submitted.  A specialist in academic language might facilitate the first three or so sessions (Kozar & Lum, 2015).  Research shows that candidates value these experiences appreciably.     

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Research training: Grant applications

• To improve the capacity of researchers to write grant applications, institutions should develop a template that stipulates the activities these individuals should complete during the 3 to 6 months before the due date.  For example, this template might indicate the times during which the researchers should seek advice from statistics, write an elevator pitch, complete a short preliminary study, and so forth.  Although researchers can adjust these deadlines to suit their needs, this template enables these individuals to set appropriate timelines and milestones—a key feature of successful grant applications (Kulage & Larson, 2018; Wisdom et al., 2005)

• Institutions should introduce aims review committees.  In essence, before academics write a grant application, they should be invited first to prepare, and then submit, an overview of their research project in one page.  According to Nigrovic (2017), this single page should characterize the problem the research addresses, the aims or hypotheses, preliminary data that have been collected, and the distinct and key features of the approach these researchers will adopt to fulfill the aims—like an elevator pitch.  A committee then comments on the aim, the writing style, and the strength as well as flaws of these arguments. Research indicates that reviews of these short overviews may be more efficient than reviews of entire grant applications (Nigrovic, 2017).

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Research supervision and support

• To manage the diversity of graduate researchers—including candidates with disabilities, carer responsibilities, and work responsibilities—supervisors should perhaps stagger their leave, so that one individual is available to candidates at all times.  In addition, the office space that is available to candidates should vary across the candidature.  In the first year, candidates need to be granted more opportunities to access communities of peers whereas, during the last year, candidates need to be granted more quiet space.  Furthermore, supervisors should contemplate how they can utilize the prior experiences of candidates—such as candidates who have worked in academia or work settings before (Shaw & Picard, 2019).

• Most graduate researchers are assigned two or more supervisors.  Whenever possible, the supervisors should be encouraged to meet, without the candidate, to discuss the project.  According to Wald et al. (2022), the supervisors should briefly discuss their expertise, their workload, their mutual responsibilities to the candidate, the size, scope, and viability of this project, the adequacy of funding and resources, timeframes or milestones, preferred frequency of meetings, preferences around correcting drafts, and authorship on publications, if any.  Grossman and Crowther (2015) suggested other topics the co-supervisors might discuss without the candidate—such as how to manage conflicts, whether all emails should be copied, and the degree to which the supervisors should grant the candidate autonomy.  

• To increase the likelihood that graduate researchers are likely to progress in their studies rather than leave the university prematurely, supervisors should first help these candidates manage their workloads.  To illustrate, supervisors should encourage these candidates to study only during office hours.  Supervisors should not send the candidates emails outside work hours. Every month or so, supervisors should discuss with candidates some opportunities to diminish workload, such as more efficient research methods or how to confine the scope of this research. If candidates ever study on the weekend or after hours, they should complete only the activities they perceive as relaxing, invigorating, or enlightening. Second, supervisors need to balance the inclination to assist candidates, and thus instruct these individuals how to proceed, with the need to grant these individuals autonomy.  To achieve this balance, institutions should confirm the research interests of each candidate overlaps with the research publications of at least one supervisor—but that each supervisor grant these candidates the opportunity to contribute their own ideas to the project. For example, supervisors might distribute articles to the candidate they have not read themselves.  Finally, institutions need to arrange many opportunities that enable candidates to meet peers who share similar interests and perspectives.  Institutions might, for example, organize a range of interest groups—and candidates should be encouraged to attend at least one of these groups.  Reduced workload, increased autonomy, overlap between the interests of supervisors and candidates, as well as a sense of belonging all reduce the likelihood that candidates intend to quit prematurely (van Rooij et al., 2021).   

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Research impact

• When institutions justify the impact of their research, they almost invariably allude to the explicit knowledge that stakeholders, such as practitioners or organizations, acquired—that is, the knowledge they can articulate.  However, research often shapes stakeholders tacitly: the assumptions, inclinations, decisions, and behaviors of individuals, teams, or organizations might shift, even if nobody can articulate these changes explicitly.  Institutions thus need to develop methods to demonstrate these tacit changes.  They might, for example, submit videos that show how the behaviors of individuals or teams shifted over time as a consequence of the research.  In addition, institutions might also submit videos that show the conversations of stakeholders after the research—because these interactions often epitomize more tacit changes (Mitchel et al., 2022)

 

Design of classrooms

• In some classes, especially in humanities and social sciences, the teacher and students often need to discuss and debate issues.  In these classes, student learn effectively if they sit close to the teacher and thus feel immersed in the conversation.  The room should thus be designed to enable teachers and students to sit or stand as close as possible.  In other classes, especially in the natural sciences, the teacher and students may not need to discuss and debate issues.  Instead, students often need to think carefully. In these classes, student do not learn more effectively if they sit close to the teacher.  The seats can thus be more dispersed across the room.  The design of classes, therefore, should vary, depending on the pedagogy or academic discipline (Chan et al., 2022)

• Classrooms in which seats are arranged in rows and columns may be preferable when students need to study or to work independently.  However, classrooms in which seats are arranged in a semicircular design may be preferable when students need to collaborate—such as converse about topics or complete shared activities.  This arrangement enables students to concentrate on one another more effectively, improving concentration and diminishing the effects of distractions.  Semicircular designs also tend to be perceived as more humane, comfortable, and convenient, instilling a sense of belonging but reducing a sense of formality (Yang et al., 2022).      

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Design of curricula

• To diminish competition, some tertiary education institutions attempt to forge a niche and, for example, orient their efforts to a particular region or industry only.  Unfortunately, during times in which student demand subsides—perhaps because of high inflation—these institutions are particularly vulnerable.  That is, these institutions are not as likely to have developed the teaching and technical capabilities to compete.  Consequently, during economic downturns, the number of students that enroll at these institutions is especially like to plummet (Cattaneo et al., 2019).  To override this problem, even during times of economic stability, tertiary education institutions should attempt to implement some innovations that attract students from competitors rather than depend on niche markets.  Furthermore, when student demand subsides, institutions in proximity to one another should collaborate to launch campaigns that attract many students to the region (Cattaneo et al., 2019)  

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Governance

• The CEO of tertiary education institutions—such as Vice Chancellors, Presidents, or Directors—should be formally excluded from the remuneration committees of their institutions.  In Australia, for example, fewer than 30% of universities have instituted this rule.  In addition, either the government or the council, senate, or board should set principles to restrict CEO remuneration—perhaps to 6 to 8 times the average salary of staff.  If these limits are not imposed, CEO remuneration tends to be excessive.  To illustrate, Vice Chancellors tend to be paid more in Australia than almost every other nation, but the existing university rankings do not justify these rates.  In addition, in the 1980s, Vice Chancellors of elite Australian universities were paid about 3 times junior academics; in 2018, this number escalated to 16.  Yet, these rates of remuneration tend to be unrelated to performance (Boden & Rowlands, 2022)

• In most governing board of universities—usually called the Council or Senate in Australia—is a subcommittee that nominates and selects future members.  Often, these nomination committees do not include staff, students, or indeed anyone who interacts with the university besides their role on this governing board. Consequently, nomination committees may select members whose capabilities and perspectives diverge from the priorities and preferences of staff and students, violating the 1997 UNESCO Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel.  Furthermore, because nomination committees often exclude staff and students, these sub-committees may tend to select individuals whose profiles are similar to existing members.  The nomination committees may become increasingly homogenous over time, limiting the diversity of perspectives and thus compromising the legitimacy and utility of decisions.  Instead, governments or, if applicably, institutions should include staff, and perhaps student, representatives on nomination committees (Schroder-Turk, 2021).

• To improve equity and to prevent unconscious biases in decisions around selection and promotion, institutions should introduce the roe of equity advocates—staff members who are trained to help departments and portfolios choose staff equitably.  These staff may identify behaviors, activities, principles, or judgments that could disadvantage one race or ethnicity.   They might, for example, question the use of a psychometric instrument that disadvantages a particular race (Cahn et al, 2022).  Or they might recognize the panel shift the questions slightly, depending on the sex or age of the applicant.

• Often, the main governing body of tertiary education institutions—often called the council, board of trustees, board of regents, or board of governors—is too reliant on the executives to reach decisions.  They are not apprised of alternative courses of action or the reasons that executives want to pursue specific actions and seldom appreciate the detailed operations of institutions.  Hence, they are often unable to challenge executives proficiently.  To override this problem, members of these governing bodies should develop stronger relationships with the academic community.  For example, they might attend joint committees with academics as well as uncover opportunities to empower academic boards or senates—such as respond to the minutes of academic board meetings and diminish the number of executives who attend these meetings (Shattock, 2013).

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Integrity and misconduct

• Occasionally, students will suspect that an academic has engaged in misconduct.  For example, doctoral candidates might discover their supervisor has plagiarized some of their work.  Unfortunately, in these circumstances, the students often feel their concerns are trivialized, disregarded, doubted, or even ostracized.  They may be referred to a range of services, elongating this traumatic experience (Becker, 2019).  Institutions must enable and encourage students to report these matters as efficiently, seamlessly, and supportively as possible—even if confidentially.  Institutions could establish a team that identifies a range of practices that could be applied to investigate or to redress misconduct, even if students want to remain anonymous. For example, the academic who is suspected of misconduct and colleagues of this academic might be obliged to attend a workshop on misconduct.  The attendants would be informed that misconduct is suspected but would not identify the perpetrator.  Participants might be informed the institution plans to investigate whether preliminary work of candidates, such as research proposals, were plagiarized.

• Students, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, often commission another person or organization to complete their assignments, called contract cheating.  To stem contract cheating, coalitions of institutions should collect examples of contract cheating in various disciplines.  Academics should attempt to guess which assignments demonstrate contract cheating—and then develop a set of indicators that should raise suspicion, such as use of words that are common in another culture or nation, abrupt changes in how students write, and essays that are proficient but not tailored to answer the question well (Ison, 2020).  This approach has been shown to improve the capacity of markers to identify contract cheating (Dawson & Sutherland-Smith, 2019)

• Institutions should invest in software that is designed to identify contract cheating, such as JStylo Authorship Attribution Framework.  This software is designed to determine whether a set of assignments were completed by one person: the student. Markers should be encouraged to utilize this software if they suspect contract cheating (Ison, 2020).  In addition, to deter contract cheating, institutions should inform students of the possibility their work can be subjected to this software.   

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Accreditation and evaluation

• Academic staff often need to contribute to the attempts of institutions to improve their evaluations or rankings.  In the UK, for example, they might need to contribute information to the Research Excellence Framework.  To promote engagement in these exercises, the institution needs to enable and encourage academics to develop expertise in one specific activity that is relevant to this institution; that is, academics need to feel capable and important in one task.  Second, the institution should grant academics choice in how they contribute to this evaluation or ranking.  Third, the institution should encourage academics to join communities of practice—in which each community contributes to this evaluation or ranking as creatively as possible.  The ensuing sense of competence, autonomy, and connection tends to promote more favorable attitudes in academics towards these exercises (Weinstein et al., 2020). 

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Fundraising

• To enhance the capacity of academic leaders, such as deans, to help attract philanthropic funds, institutions should estimate the level of funding they could attract if these leaders were granted more time to engage in this activity.  A proportion of this funding could be utilized to increase the number of assistant leaders, such as associate deans (Hunsaker & Aldous, 2018).  This increase in the number of assistant leaders not only grants academic leaders more time to raise funds but also facilitates succession planning.  Second, academic leaders and officers in advancement should be granted more opportunities to receive joint training and development on fundraising.  These joint opportunities not only extend the skills of these individuals but may also improve the collaboration between academic leaders and officers in advancement—a key determinant of successful fundraising (Hunsaker & Aldous, 2018).