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This paper looks at the debate on the contribution of Higher Education (HE)

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We report upon implementing blended self-managed action learning (SMAL) within graduate and postgraduate courses in digital entrepreneurship. In four out of five cases, we found that SMAL was highly motivating to our learners and integrated well with a blended and flexible approach to learning. We report a case where a SMAL set broke down due to the presence of a charismatic learner who was visibly biased against SMAL and questioned its utility from the outset. We suggest that the risk of similar breakdowns might be managed by developing a questionnaire to pre-assess participants' readiness for action learning and increasing the level or support during SMAL set meetings. While SMAL did not give rise to independent action learning sets after the courses, we were surprised and encouraged to find that learners instigated independent virtual learning networks, which flourished for up to a year after the courses. On the basis of this experiment we suggest that blended and fully virtual SMAL are worthy of further investigation in higher education and beyond

The aim of this article is to explore the historical context of vocationalism in universities. It is based on an analysis of the history of the university from a vocational perspective. It looks for evidence of vocational engagement in the activities of universities over time, taking a long view from the birth of the Western University in the Middle Ages to the 1980s with the emergence of current issues of vocationalism in university education. It adopts a chronological perspective initially and then a thematic one. The main findings are: (1) vocationalism in university education is as old as the Western University itself, (2) there is evidence from the start of the Western University of vocational engagement in terms of the provision of vocationally relevant subjects, vocationally relevant skills and the development of vocationally relevant attitudes, (3) whereas most graduate employers used to be concerned with the vocationally relevant knowledge, skills and attitudes students acquired on their degree courses, most are now more concerned with graduate capacity and disposition to learn within their employment after graduation and (4) subject-centred education is compatible with university education that supports the vocational aspirations of students.