Quality assurance and enhancement exercises are important in higher education. Curriculum assurance and enhancement exercise, relied in the past primarily on raw assessment data and self-reported, which lacked follow-up mechanisms gauging its effectiveness. This paper reports on an impact study of a curriculum review exercise using both digitalised data and self-reported data. Both the original review and its impact study were conducted on an English Programme in a Hong Kong university taken by around 6,000 students each year. Both adopted a learning analytics approach with digitalised behavioural and assessment data. Results of the impact study, which is the focus of this paper, demonstrate the strength of using learning analytics, including its capability of inter-course and intra-course investigations. Learning analytics can also empirically confirm and/or refute concerns reported by teachers and students. The use of digitalised data for learning analytics offers opportunities to implement and follow-up on quality assurance measures.

There has been growing awareness that refugees profit from being involved in meaningful activities soon after arriving in their new country of residence. Learning the language of the host country seems to be a priority of many initiatives. Yet, in countries like the Netherlands, highly educated refugees might benefit more from initially improving their academic English, as this provides access to higher education and allows them to (re)enter professional life. Drawing on a small-scale needs analysis, this case study showcases the design and implementation of pedagogic tasks that intend to support refugees learning English in the Netherlands for academic or professional purposes.

This study reports on a task-based analysis of target discourse by examining a corpus of naturally occurring face-to-face office-hour interactions between English-speaking students and instructors at a US university. Fourteen office hours involving 106 interactants were extracted from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English and coded for types of office hours, sub-tasks, and pragmatic and interactional features. Based on the findings, a prototypical model of an office-hour interaction was produced, which can serve as a sound basis for developing genuine pedagogic tasks for teaching EAP students the necessary second language pragmatics to navigate office-hours.

This chapter discusses the use of assessments of language proficiency in admissions decisions. Assessments of language proficiency are increasingly important given the rising numbers of international students studying abroad, the increasing numbers of refugees and students who need to demonstrate their linguistic preparedness for academic study, and the importance of language support programs for students not meeting particular language requirements. The chapter describes the need for students to have a level of language proficiency that represents minimum entrance requirements as one condition for academic success. Finally, the chapter discusses the importance of using benchmarks and standards to inform college-admissions decisions meaningfully as well as additional challenges institutions face in predicting students’ academic success.