Coventry University

About: Coventry University is a education organization based out in Coventry, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Higher education. The organization has 4964 authors who have published 12700 publications receiving 255898 citations. The organization is also known as: Lanchester Polytechnic & Coventry Polytechnic.

Strategic leadership in academic development

Abstract: The nature of academic work is changing rapidly, with moves towards professionalisation taking place against a background of fragmentation. Indeed, some aspects of professionalisation may have a fragmenting effect. It is suggested that there remains considerable value in the idea of an integrated faculty role. Noting that leaders in staff development face similar pressures to professionalise, the writers consider what expertise is required for the leadership in academic development role, and how role holders and those aspiring to the role may best develop their professional capabilities. They argue for an integrated conception of academic development, and a correspondingly integrated view of the developer’s professional identity and role. It is suggested that this will put leaders in academic development into a position that is more congruent with faculty self‐perceptions, and enable them to support those in faculty roles more effectively.

Improving the Efficiency of Tabu Search for Machine Sequencing Problems

Abstract: Tabu search (TS) is becoming increasingly recognized as an efficient way of finding high-quality solutions to hard combinatorial problems. It may be described as an intelligent meta-heuristic for controlling simpler local search procedures. However, reported applications have often used a ‘brute-force’ approach without considering the most effective use of the computing effort available. This paper intends firstly to give a basic introduction to the ideas of TS, and then it will report some computational experiments on TS in the context of machine sequencing. These have shown that it is important to define the balance between exploration of the solution space and exploitation of the information obtained. The results will be compared with those obtained from a proven Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm, which tends to confirm the general opinion that when implemented efficiently, TS is a more effective search paradigm than SA.