Higher education institutions (HEIs) demand from their faculty excellent teaching output and substantial number of quality productive scholarship, hence, balancing work and family demands becomes a central challenge among academics to maintain a healthy work-life balance. The decision to have children and family shapes the career trajectories of academics as well as their research productivity in particular. Striking a balance between attending to family matters and becoming scholarly productive is a tall order among Filipino women academics, having a culture that is just beginning to adopt to the more egalitarian aspect of attending to family matters. The empirical result of this study shows that indeed, parenting is a moderating factor between work-life balance and research productivity among Filipino women academics. Female faculty members in particular are susceptible to a balancing act between family commitments most especially in producing quality researches. Family life still pervades within the spectrum of research productivity on one side and work-life balance on the other end among women academics.

Research productivity plays an important role in the prestige and reputation among higher education institutions. However, the time spent to do research among Filipino academics is the most pressing issue since they can barely meet the requirement for research productivity. Further, the lack of time for data gathering aggravated the drawbacks for research productivity. Data gathering is at the core of almost all research activity, the absence of factual and reliable data will lead to an invalid and illogical inference. In research years, there has been a massive agglomeration of data in large volumes coming from diverse sources pertaining to almost all facets of human activity which is worthy of investigation-known today as Big Data. This research has two (2) main objectives; the first is to find out the underlying reasons why Filipino academics are not enthusiastic to do research. The second is to evaluate the value of big data utilization for research productivity based on the assessment of the faculty members. This research used the Rasch model to measure the responses of Filipino academics with regards to their reasons for not doing enough research work as well as on their assessment for value creation of big data utilization using a polytomous item response selection scale.

The pressing issue of plagiarism in academia pervaded the very fiber of ethical behavior among students. Plagiarism detection software may only go as far as detecting strings of words that were copied from the Net; nevertheless, the problem still remains apparent due to lack of students’ affective ability to comprehend the consequences of plagiarism and its underlying ethical misdemeanor. Appreciative pedagogy was introduced in this context to permeate among students’ mindset the importance of directing the teachinglearning process into a track of profound collective thought to create a positive image of an ideal pedagogical mechanism impressing among students what is right and appropriate. Appreciative pedagogy is a creative method to solve the problem of plagiarism that touches the foundation of the issue rather than merely treating the problem at its tip. It is expected that through appreciative pedagogy of elucidating plagiarism and its consequences, students will have a better output away from the usual copy-paste behavior. The recent development of plagiarism detection software is a good initiative to distinguish copied works from the original, however, it would only gone that far enough. Without affecting the value system of the students about the consequences of plagiarism the issue will never stop.   Keywords - plagiarism, appreciative pedagogy, idea stealing, creative methodology, plagiarism detection, Philippines

Learning a foreign language such as English usually takes a considerable amount of effort on the part of non-native speakers. The English language as the modern-day lingua franca in almost all aspects of global communications spanning from business to the academe requires that students should be adept of it after they finished their tertiary education. The Southeast Asian Region in which the Philippines belong, is trying to catch-up with the global productivity index that must produce college graduates that are adept in using the English language in order to be competitive. Learning English in college through the use of traditional teaching methods makes students disinterested and disengaged in their course works. The advent of technology specifically the Internet has offered an alternative method to learn English in a more interesting and engaging way through synchronous and asynchronous learning methods such as the massive open online courses (MOOCs). This learning modality has eased the tension of acquiring the necessary English language proficiency among college students. This study is anchored on the structural equation modelling about the effects of MOOCs in learning the English language along with their learning grit from the vantage point of Filipino college students.