Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

This book addresses key spheres of teaching and learning in higher education from the dual vantage points of educators in the UK and China. It covers a wide range of teaching topics, methods, and approaches used within and useful for educators working in varying higher education contexts. This book fills a gap in China’s educational literature marketplace for material with robust theoretical underpinning but firmly practical orientation. Alongside, there is keen interest in the UK and other Western countries in material presenting East/West perspectives in every field. The impetus for this book derives from cross-national dialogues between UK and China higher education leaders and practitioners sharing and exchanging their experience and expertise in the area of teaching and learning. These have demonstrated a thirst, in both countries, for “meta learning” on the evidence-based and experiential ways to learn covered in this book.

Shidong Wang is Director of Oxford Prospects and Global Development Institute, Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. He holds a Ph.D. from Bonn University, Germany, and spent time as Research Fellow at UC Berkeley, before taking up his research position at Oxford. He is also Visiting Professor with the China Youth University of Political Science and Fudan University. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2015. Dr. Wang is Founder of the UK-China University Presidents’ Round-table dialogue. He served as Acting President of the China-UK University Counselling Association (2020-2022). His research focus is quantitative research within the social sciences, including evolutionary game theory, marketing research and technological innovation, and population genetics.  His recent work has focused on the intersection of business ethics and economics, where he applies human preferences to designing resilient organisations in times of AI using the simplest possible mathematical framework.

Zuoyu Zhou is Professor in the Faculty of Education of Beijing Normal University (BNU). He has served as Vice President of BNU and President of the Educational Evaluation Branch of the Chinese Association of Higher Education. He was a Visiting Scholar at Indiana University Bloomington and Boston College in 1999 and Fulbright Senior Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Stanford University in 2008.  He served as Vice President of Xinjiang Normal University from August 2011 to July 2014. Professor Zhou was selected as one of the "New Century Excellent Talents Support Program" by the Ministry of Education, China (2006) and one of the "Hundred Talents Project of Social Science Theory in the New Century" by Beijing Municipal City (2009). His research areas cover educational philosophy, higher education, and human resource management.

Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Bristol and Professor of Higher Education (emeritus) at the University of Oxford, Joint Editor-in-Chief of Higher Education, Honorary Professor at Tsinghua University in China, and Professorial Associate at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK and in Australia, Fellow of the Society for Research into Higher Education in the UK, and a member of Academia Europaea. Prof. Marginson's research is focused primarily on global, international, and comparative higher education, global science, higher education in East Asia, and the contributions of higher education to the common good. His recent books include Global higher education in times of upheaval: On common goods, geopolitics and decolonisation (Bloomsbury Academic, January 2026).