Universities are facing growing internal and external pressures to generate income, educate a widening continuum of learners, and make effective use of digital technologies. One response has been growth of online education, catalysed by Massive Open Online Courses, availability of digital devices and technologies, and notions of borderless global education. In growing online education, learning and teaching provision has become increasingly disaggregated, and universities are partnering with a range of private companies to reach new learners, and commercialise educational provision. In this paper, we explore the competing drivers which impact decision making within English universities and their strategies to grow online education provision, through interviews with senior managers, and interrogation of their views through the lens of a range of internal, external and organisational drivers. We show that pressures facing universities may be alleviated by growth of online education provision, but that negotiating an appropriate route to realise this ambition involves attempts to resolve these underlying tensions deriving from competing drivers. We use a modified form of the PEST model to demonstrate the complexities, inter-dependencies and processes associated with these drivers when negotiating delivery of unbundled online education through use of private company services, or in partnership with private companies.

The focus of this paper is on the contestations and dilemmas emergent in the higher education curriculum in a context of increasing processes of unbundling, digitisation and marketisation. The paper explores the notion of contestation through the theoretical lens of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory. It points to illustrative examples of this contestation from empirical data drawn from stakeholder research in South African higher education. The paper grapples with understandings of the concept of curriculum and argues how these have been shaped byand are shapingemergent meanings of the curriculum in an unbundling context. The argument is that these emergent meanings are a function of different explicit and tacit understandings of curriculum and what higher education offers to students. These understandings are deepened or modified by processes of unbundling. Empirical data from the research study show these understandings to be forming against the backdrop of powerful cultural and agentic forces and players.

Initial teacher education programs across the world bear many resemblances to one another in respect to their overall design features. Students generally follow courses that teach them foundational knowledge pertaining to education, like psychology or sociology, disciplinary knowledge in particular subject areas, and general and specific pedagogical knowledge. In addition, students are exposed to varying degrees of school placements. Despite these similarities in overall structure, the curriculum content and activities of teacher preparation may vary considerably, dependent on the underpinning conceptions of the goals and purposes of the program. Historical and geographical contexts also influence the choice of particular goals for teacher education. Conceptions of teacher education can be clustered in a number of major approaches, each with its own subcategories. Although different terminologies may be used in the literature, the six major categories are as follows: a social justice approach, a master-apprentice approach, an applied science approach, a teacher identity approach, a competence approach, and a reflective approach. Each approach has certain key features and implications for curriculum design in teacher education, including vision, goals, content, teaching and learning methodologies, and the relationship between schools and colleges/universities. An example here is the difference between an applied science approach, based on the notion of teachers putting theories into practice, and a reflective practice approach, where teachers are encouraged to construct personal theories in and from practice. A second example of the different emphases is the extent to which education is located within its larger social context, with the relationship between school and society being more explicit within a social justice than a competence approach to teacher education. Conceptions may be implicit or explicit; in reality, most programs embody hybrid models with emphasis in particular directions. The articulation of the key concepts, principles, and assumptions that underpin the design of teacher education programs contributes to the field in various ways. Promoting an understanding of different traditions of teacher education helps establish a shared vocabulary and knowledge base; this can improve the quality of teacher education through deepening academic debate and enhancing program coherence. In addition, strengthening the conceptual base of teacher education supports the professional autonomy of teacher educators, through advancing debate on the purposes, ethics, and politics of education and providing tools to discuss the curriculum implications of policy reform.

This paper explores how academics navigate the Higher Education (HE) landscape being reshaped by the convergence of unbundling, marketisation and digitisation processes. Social Realism distinguishes three layers of social reality (in this case higher education): the empirical, the actual and the real. The empirical layer is presented by the academics and their teaching; the actual are the institutional processes of teaching, learning, assessment, mode of provision (online, blended); the real are the power and regulatory mechanisms that shape the first two and affect academics' agency. Two dimensions of academics' experiences and perceptions are presented. The structural dimension reflects academics' perceptions of the emergent organisation of the education environment including the changing narratives around digitisation, marketisation and unbundling in the context of digital inequalities. The professional dimension aspects play out at the actor level with respect to work-related issues, particularly their own. This dimension is portrayed in academics' concerns about ownership and control.

This article explores how leaders, key decision-makers in research-intensive public universities perceive marketisation in the sector in relation to public-private arrangements in teaching and learning provision. The focus is on the nature of relationships between public universities and those private companies engaged in the co-creation, delivery and support of educational provision. It draws on 16 interviews with decision makers-senior leaders and managers in higher education at six research-intensive universities in South Africa and England. Questions raised in this article are: How do senior decision makers perceive the entry of private players into public higher education? What are their experiences of working in partnership with private companies? What effect do they think the relationship is having on the status of the public university? How do they Czerniewicz, Mogliacci, Walji, Swartz, Ivancheva, Negotiating the "new normal": University leaders and marketisation Swinnerton and Morris 50 talk about the market actors? We observe that university leaders in both study countries, despite their different positions in the global field of higher education, and the hybrid moral economy around processes of marketisation all use language borrowed from the business sector to justify or reject marketisation. This indicates an unprecedented level of normalisation of this rhetoric in a public sector otherwise sensitive to language use posing serious questions about the nature of public universities in this marketised era.