Online education both does and does not radically transform higher education and higher education brands. On the one hand, providing courses online potentially allows universities to reach a worldwide audience, helps them globalize their brand, changes the cost structure for both students and institutions, and could reshape the competitive branding landscape among universities. On the other hand, university brands are surprisingly regional, low student–faculty ratios are still necessary for truly high-quality education, and the online competitive landscape might ultimately simply replicate reputational hierarchies forged over decades in the world of on-campus education. Thus, although the idea that online learning will completely “disrupt” the higher education model and existing university branding hierarchies is almost certainly overstated, online education will inevitably become more and more integral to universities, and over time the distinction between on-campus and online education is likely to become increasingly blurred. As a result, online education brings both promise and peril for universities as they manage their brands while increasingly adopting online education modalities. This chapter first provides an overview of the online education landscape in higher education. Then, it outlines some of the core issues that universities must address as they consider and implement online education strategies while managing their brand.

Brazil accounts for half of South America's territory and population. Given this large scale and its federal structure, the country can be described as highly heterogeneous. In this context, universities have a crucial role in social change and mobility. Research is closely linked to university life. This chapter provides an overview of undergraduate research in Brazil and its impact on individuals, universities, and society. First, we present an historical outline of the development of the national education and higher education system. Second, we describe administrative issues and cultural impact. Third, we show examples of best practice, selecting specific disciplines and aspects. Finally, we summarize the main themes and provide an outlook on expected further developments concerning undergraduate research in Brazil.

Millions of Germans helped to transform much of North America during the 19th century, and smaller numbers did similar things across Latin America, in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, Eastern Europe and especially Imperial Russia. As they did that, they also built and moved across networks of communication, trade, and transportation that expanded over generations. The nodal points in these extra-European networks were often transcultural places filled with varieties of Germans who were frequently being or becoming German plus other things. At the same time, across polycentric German-speaking Europe there were many centers, places of belonging, that often tied together people across vast regions. Many of these centers had a global reach; even when they remained modest in size and can be difficult to find on political maps, they frequently held great significance for people’s mental maps. Often discounted today, it was the notion of a German cultural community, or Kulturgemeinshaft, which recognized commonalities across the many differences that tied these disparate people and their orientations together and provided many with considerable cultural capital as they went abroad.

Universities, as with other social institutions, have had to adapt to the pressures of change driven by the digital revolution. Given that education as a discipline is rooted in the very practice of transformation, it is not surprising it could play a core role in promoting and developing this new terrain; at least that was the vision in the 1990’s. Twenty years on, it appears higher education may well have missed some opportunities. The recognition of student-centred learning, while upheld in rhetoric, has failed to be realised in practice. Much of the digital influence in higher education has concentrated on technologies for content delivery to support the principle that learning is the result of teaching. In this chapter, we offer an alternative view of learning as a personal endeavour fuelled by inquiry rather than institutional compliance. We argue that emerging wearable technologies offer a new frontier into the science of learning, in ways that were previously unimaginable. We begin by addressing our rationale and some of the historical tensions in this space. This is followed by two scenarios where wearable devices were deployed by students, eager to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of stress and sleep on their academic endeavours. We believe this work illustrates the importance of physiological markers for a more student-centred approach in the practice of learning.

Chapter 5 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet discusses the relationship between cities, knowledge, and power, arguing against the casual link scholars often make between cities and “civilization,” a concept with too many congratulatory overtones. Referring to cities around the world, the chapter shows how urban monumental architecture and the mass processions and ceremonies that monuments were designed to accommodate repeatedly served to disseminate state-sponsored propaganda glorifying authoritarian rule and violence. It also traces the role of smaller spaces in cities in generating “Axial Age” knowledge that was skeptical of state propaganda, noting that authoritarian rulers sought to coopt or contain such knowledge to support their continued rule by building universities, libraries, schools, and temples and other spaces of worship while censoring ideas they deemed too critical. In this way, cities did help spread new knowledges and technologies, making it possible for smaller-scale cults and schools of philosophy to become the kernels of later “world” religions and secular knowledge systems. Throughout the pre-modern era, however, the spread of knowledge was subject to sharp boundaries delimited by the urban-centered infrastructure of basic literacy, even as city-based technologies often acted as a force in expanding the human population on Earth.

In economics the labour force comes out of nowhere. Under capitalism children are still produced at home. Under slavery they were reared for profit. Children were reared collectively in kibbutzim and boarding schools. In industrialising Britain child labour paid for itself. Affluent societies rely on communal education. Even private schools are not-for-profit. The slogan of school choice was invented for racial segregation. Its appeal is social separation. For politicians and wealthy backers the charter school/free school/academy model is ideological money-laundering and opportunities for enrichment. Despite three decades of effort school choice has failed. Universities derive their economic support from student fees financed by government loans. This encourages expensive facilities, at the expense of students and staff. Student loans have become a lifelong burden exacerbating inequality. Bringing children to maturity relies on family altruism and public education. Other methods have failed.

No less important a structural development than the emancipation of natural philosophy from metaphysics was the self-conscious emancipation of theology from philosophy, largely achieved by making philology and historical scholarship – rather than philosophy – the primary handmaidens to the discipline. This did not happen at the hands of a small band of liberal outsiders (‘Erasmians’, ‘latitudinarians’, etc.), but within the theological mainstream. In the Catholic world, all major locales (starting with the Spanish Netherlands, and culminating in France) witnessed a self-conscious shift from ‘scholastic’ to ‘positive’ theological method. By the second half of the seventeenth century, a similar development had occurred in all the major areas of the Reformed world. Crucially, this shift should not be taken for a form of ‘fideism’, even if its conceptual resources sometimes seem to imply it. At the basic epistemological level, conceptions of theological truth remained broadly the same as they had been since c.1300: divine mysteries could be above reason, but could not contradict it; the truths of natural theology could be proved rationally. But within this broadly continuous framework a huge methodological shift took place, one that significantly curtailed the cultural authority of apriorist philosophy. Calls for the separation of philosophy and theology usually worked to the detriment of the former.

This chapter charts the way in which the study of nature was made increasingly less philosophical between 1500 and 1700. At the start of the period, natural philosophy was largely conducted as a form of ‘metaphysical physics’. The erosion of this approach was driven by three factors: 1) the impact of humanist critique; 2) The colonisation of natural philosophy by physicians; 3) The colonisation of natural philosophy by mixed mathematicians. Despite a spirited fightback from the metaphysicians, by the middle of the seventeenth century the anti-metaphysical physicians and mixed-mathematicians – often operating in tandem – had won. A major concomitant of this is that the idea that most of seventeenth-century natural philosophy was grounded in ontological mechanism is wrong. To the extent that natural philosophers were mechanists, they were operational mechanists, who modelled nature on machines but refused to commit to an ontological reductionism, and often directly opposed it. In this and other respect, Descartes and his followers, far from being representative of seventeenth-century natural philosophy, were outliers.

This chapter considers the major societal, economic and cultural changes that occurred in the 13th century. It also discusses the mendicant orders (Franciscans, Dominicans), the universities and the impact of Islamic scholars (Avicenna, Averroes) on scholastic theology.

From Walter Raleigh’s The Study of English Literature (1900) to the Newbolt Commission’s report, The Teaching of English in England (1921), the first two decades of the twentieth century saw the consolidation of ‘English’ as a school subject and university discipline, within and against a critical culture that was often international, anti-institutional, dissonant. This chapter tells the parallel and divergent stories of this disciplinary formation and this critical explosion: institutionally, university chairs and formal examinations in English literature were established; counter-culturally, new manifestoes and little magazines blasted past forms of critical discourse. But histories of this criticism have often remained parochial, in both scope and method. Focusing on three figures (Leonard Woolf, Sarojini Naidu, and Caroline Spurgeon), the chapter shows how their various passages – geographical, social, and literary – might offer both an alternative, global, critical history for these decades, and a new sense of how we might tell that history.

This chapter provides the conclusion to the book, summarizing the findings and main points of each chapter. It also outlines the contribution the book makes to an understanding of the characteristics of dyslexic university student anxiety and an identification of ways of coping that students with dyslexia employ to deal with the cognitive and emotional difficulties manifested by their dyslexia. Implications of this for dyslexia practitioners, for universities and for academics responsible for teaching and delivery of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes are specified. In relation to the dyslexia practitioner, the chapter provides pragmatic advice on ways of using appropriate support styles that combine targeted emotional support with delivery and development of suitable cognitive techniques. Guidance is also provided on ways that emotional support could be utilised during individual sessions with students to encourage open discussions on academic areas where the student may feel vulnerable and sensitive emotionally. For universities, practical suggestions are made on ways of ensuring that the academic environment fosters an inclusive culture to establish a suitable, supportive and inspiring place of learning for students with dyslexia where they feel secure and encouraged to discuss any emotional difficulties they may be susceptible to.