How Faculty Student Partnerships Can Minimize Student Attrition and Enhance Research/Instruction

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Clifford E. Tyler,  School of Education, National University, USA

Abstract

Slovenian higher education (hereafter HE) legislation ensures that students are relatively well integrated in different evaluation procedures as well as in decision- making on the national and on the institutional level. However, the analysis of the Slovenian Quality Assurance Agency’s (SQAA) 2013 report on quality in Slovenian higher education, which contains the evaluation of more than 100 reports, indicated that only one part of the students’ population is directly integrated in the higher education development and quality assurance (QA) procedures prepared by the SQAA experts on a basis of external evaluations, site visits, and initial accreditation procedures of Slovenian study programs and higher education institutions (HEI), and a pilot research conducted among 422 students of Slovenian HEIs.

Keywords: Student-faculty partnerships, student retention, university accreditation

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How University Teachers Perceive Incentives and Obstacles in Modernizing Their Teaching

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Barica Marentič Požarnik,* Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Abstract

What obstacles impede introducing necessary innovations in teaching in higher education? What can be done to overcome them? These basic questions were analyzed on the basis of opinions gathered from five groups of participants from different disciplines that attended a course on improving university teaching at the University of Ljubljana in 2013-2014. Those findings cannot be generalized, as participants represented a specially motivated group of teachers (they volunteered to attend the course). Nevertheless, they can give us some valuable insights into forces that shape university teachers’ everyday teaching practice.

Keywords: pedagogical excellence, faculty incentives,  student evaluations

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