From Singapore to South Korea, Hong Kong to Malaysia, and elsewhere in the region, higher education hubs are emerging across Asia and the student enrollment has increased significantly in many Asian countries (Dessoff, 2012). This growth is attributed to the acceptance by governments that education, in all aspects of human capital and manpower planning models, is a crucial instrument for economic growth, as well as for political and social development (Chabbott, 2002). Hoque et al. (2013) stated that the government of Malaysia has linked the development of the higher education sector to the requirements of the country’s economic growth. In this regard, Yilmaz (2010) stated that between the years 2001-2006, higher education enrolment in Malaysia increased approximately by 6.7 % annually. By 2012, Malaysia has reached a gross higher education enrolment rate of 48%. This represents a 70% increase in enrolment over the last decade to reach 1.2 million students in public and private higher learning institutions comprising public universities, polytechnics, community colleges, private universities, private university colleges, and private colleges. Between 1990 and 2010, there has been a six- fold increase in Bachelor degree enrolment and a tenfold increase in Masters and PhD enrolment. The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2014) argues that higher education systems have had to ‘expand out’ by constructing new universities, hiring new faculty members, and allowing and encouraging the entry of private higher education providers. With these changes in this sector, the “higher education to work” interface is at the epicentre of current debates about employability of graduates. In essence, the debate is about what employers want and what higher education institutions can do to enhance the employability of students (Harvey, 2003). Despite the emphasis on higher education by governments, much of the focus in recent literature has been on the non-employability of graduates after completion of their qualifications.The Malaysian scenario is no different from that of other Asian countries. Jobstreet Malaysia (2013) reported that over 50% of the fresh graduates are not offered a job despite their academic qualifications and that there is a distinct gap between what the Malaysian education system produced and what employers were looking for. Other recruitment consultants, such as Nina Adlan, Director of Prospect Consulting Sdn Bhd, spoke of an obvious disconnect between what graduates put down on their curriculum vitae and what they are like in reality (Education system, 2012). She further stated that: “When we hire, we consider the way graduates converse and portray themselves to be more important than what is in the CV. What’s the point in having good academic results when they can’t communicate, can’t conduct a proper conversation and have no confidence?” Another article published in Borneo Post (Local Graduates, 5 March, 2012) quoted, “Graduates emerging from the Malaysian education system are failing to meet the expectations of prospective employers due to a lack of critical thinking skills and poor communication”. This has likely resulted in six out of ten graduates from Malaysian universities taking as much as six months to find a job. The other 40 percent may take even longer (Chapman, 2012). A number of studies were conducted to ascertain issues pertaining to employability of fresh graduates. The Chronicle of Higher Education (4March 2013) in its landmark article entitled, The Employment Mismatch reported that only 3% of employers think that a university degree is somewhat important (Fischer, 2013). Digital News Asia (23 Sept 2013) published a survey conducted by Job Street stating the top five reasons for non-employment of fresh graduates. The survey reported that 67% of the fresh graduates asked for unrealistic salary and benefits, 60% of them have poor character, attitude or personality, 55% have poor communication and collaboration skills, 55% have poor command of the English language and 42% lack required skills needed for employment. Employers’ general perception of fresh graduates leading to the nonemployability of many has led governments, parents and students alike to adopt a broader outlook towards the purpose of tertiary level studies. Studies have also been undertaken to identify what top employers look for when recruiting fresh graduates into their organization. Arising from multiple surveys with employers, the Malaysian Graduate Employability Blueprint 2012 – 2017 describes the five Cs that employers need in fresh graduates - communication, collaboration, cultural adaptation, critical thinking and problem solving, and creativity and innovation. In 2014, Nielsen, a leading global information and measurement company conducted six focus group discussions with Malaysian out-of-school youth and two parent focus groups, on their expectations of university degree outcomes. Their findings revealed that education increasingly did not have the same meaning to many parents and students as before. An academic qualification alone does not guarantee success in life; rather, it should be supplemented with a global experience and exposure to a variety of life skills. The study indicated that many parents and students were becoming more aware of the significance of possessing other skills and abilities besides the academic knowledge and skills they get from formal higher education programmes. In 2014, Taylor’s University in Malaysia conducted a similar survey involving 683 undergraduate students to ascertain skills that they felt would give them the best chance of securing jobs in the future. Besides a formal qualification, students rated having a personal mission, a set of core values, interaction skills, understanding people, motivation, drive and pursuit of success, time management, stakeholder management and self-awareness highly in the survey. It therefore appears that there is already awareness among many students and their parents that one requires more than academic qualifications to succeed in the job market and in life.

The purpose of this discussion paper is to explore the current socio-cultural context of university settings in relation to staff learning about ‘educational practice’, a term used here as synonymous with ‘learning and teaching’. There has been an increased emphasis on ‘staff development’ in educational practice and a greater focus on the responsibility of academic staff for creating effective student learning experiences. What impact have these changes had on staff engagement with the teaching aspect of their work? How are universities enhancing staff learning to enable them to meet the challenges of teaching in higher education in the 21st century? As Krause (2014, p.17) argues: ‘Just as we focus on preparing students for uncertain futures, so we need to prepare academic staff’. This paper draws on a range of international literature but focuses mainly on practice in the UK and uses specific examples of practice from one English university in which the author has been engaged in working with staff in learning about educational practice.The perspective taken in this paper is that individual learning takes place within a particular social and cultural context where staff members are learning within a group setting with the aim of achieving their own, and the organisation’s purposes. This learning is influenced by, and in turn influences, the systems, structure and culture of the organisation. Staff learning will be informal and formal, tacit and explicit. As Boreham and Morgan (2004, p. 308) note: ‘From the sociocultural perspective, learning is perceived as embedded in social and cultural contexts and best understood as a form of participation in that context’. Rather than exploring individual aspects of learning such as identity, this paper focuses on ways staff learning will be influenced by local departmental and university cultures, by the wider national and international context of higher education as these affect the particular university and also how these relate to the career ambitions of individual members of staff. Staff learning will also be influenced by disciplinary contexts within which members of staff are working. As Lave and Wenger (1991, p. 35) suggest, ‘learning is not merely situated in practice...learning is an integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world’. What impact have recent developments in relation to university education had on staff learning? How are socio-cultural factors influencing academic members of staff in relation to learning and teaching? The context will be described briefly in relation to: marketisation, teaching and research, and initiatives designed to improve teaching.

The history of highly successful organizations teaches us that their success is almost invariably tied to three elements: their vision, the will of leadership to implement transformative measures that tap personnel strengths, and above all, strategic planning. Higher education institutions, with scholarly tradition and their educational mandate, however, stand as curious exceptions to this rule. Yet the realization is setting in among academic leaders worldwide that to remain current and be ‘the best of breed in all aspects of their business”, planning must become a central preoccupation (Destin, 2012). There is a competitive dimension to global higher education today. It is a market. But more importantly, universities have a key responsibility: to produce graduates with the foundation to become global leaders, innovators and citizens for our world to sustain universal growth and development. This is no small order. The question is who will ultimately lead in this challenge to be “best in class” and how will these leading institutions adapt critical strategic planning principles to ensure they fulfill their mandate. Cultivating leadership and sustainability in a globally rich and competitive environment requires a coherent planning model. The plan must be fluid, highly adaptable, integrated and inclusive of knowledgebased strategies. These strategies must be directed at addressing current imperatives in an ever-changing world through targeted areas of intensity, excellence, competitiveness and impact. The purpose of the paper is to discuss a way for higher education institutions to build a global strategy using a framework to advance and lead as the world shifts from a global to a universal knowledge economy. In a universal knowledge economy, the lens of the world is within the context of the universe and cooperation supersedes conflict. The paper showcases how a strategic framework can be used as a critical tool to guide the strategic planning process and discover critical institutional assets and opportunities for success. Two case examples are introduced: Ohio University and its partnership with the Ministry of Education in Malaysia.

In recent debates about teaching and learning, arguments about the need to better understand students’ engagement with mathematics and lifting their performance is gaining increasing currency among mathematics teachers, educators and policy makers. The issue has received a high level of visibility in light of two major developments. First, the quality of our teaching is being judged on the basis of students’ performance in international tests such as PISA and TIMSS. There are concerns about the use of such test results in order to draw conclusions about the quality of our teaching in mathematics and the resulting ranking of schools and countries. Nevertheless, a number of national educational policy statements, including Malaysia are increasingly supportive of this international program and are keen for their students to move up the performance ladder on the basis of mean test scores. The growing interest in and the role of international tests in global benchmarking is also indicative of an implicit acknowledgement that such tests do provide a reliable window into the quality of students’ learning outcomes and by extension, the quality of mathematics instruction. Despite the reservation from some segments of the teaching profession about using test results to judge teaching quality, this perceived relationship has been given greater weight by the need to produce a workforce that is quantitatively literate and scientifically talented in order to meet the demands of a knowledge-based economy. Such a view is based on the assumption that a rich pool of scientific talent is a prerequisite for driving and sustaining an advanced economic system which calls, in turn, for citizens to work both independently and in collaboration during the search for solution of complex problems of the day such as climate change. The scenario that I have sketched above places a premium on learning quality and evidence of such learning in mathematics. But what are the critical variables that warrant our attention in this equation about learning quality and learning outcome? In this paper, my arguments are driven by the assumption that teaching and teachers play a significant role in initiating and maintaining learning and learner engagement, and ultimately the quality of mathematical learning outcomes that are required to fulfil the demands of the two aforementioned developments. The relationship between teaching, teachers and the quality of mathematics learning is a complex one and multidimensional. One useful way to untangle this network of relationship is to examine the question of what is the nature of mathematical understanding and what is it about teaching that could make a significant impact on students’ experiences with and understanding of mathematics. I suggest that analysis of the former is critical to developing arguments about the latter. Several reasons could be advanced to explain this nexus but I suggest we commence our analysis from the vantage point of organisation of mathematical knowledge that girds students’ learning and teachers’ knowledge that drive their classroom practice. Classroom practices could include a number of elements including the quality of conceptual representations provided for learners, examination of alternative solution strategies, questions posed and pondered on during instruction, the quality of problems that students are challenged with and the quality of general discourse that is generated in mathematics classrooms.