This study analyzed the survey on adults administered by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan in 2008, and logistic regression analysis showed a close relationship between learning motivations of older adults. The finding revealed that the higher age or the lower education attainment of older adults, the lower their learning motivation. The investigation of environmental factors showed that developing a comprehensive learning model boosts the participation of older adults. The study considered both individual and environmental factors, and it found being relatively young, female, and lonely had higher learning motivation. Also, the learning styles involving group activities and online learning stimulated the learning motivation of older adults.

The recent rise in globalization has brought forth a global wave of academic competitiveness, which has taken its strongest hold in East Asia. In order to attain world class status, Taiwan’s Ministry of Education (MoE) initiated a project called Plan to Develop First-class Universities and Top-level Research Centers. The project is often coined the “Five-Years-50-Billion Project,” due to the fact that the MoE will invest 50 billion New Taiwan dollars (US$1.64 billion) in the plan over a five year span. First, the authors will attempt to investigate and analyze the difference in funding rationale and policy between the periods before and after implementation. Second, this study seeks to evaluate the plan’s efficiency on an institutional level by using data envelopment analysis (DEA). Findings suggest that the current funding policy has indeed increased Taiwanese universities’ levels of internationalization and global academic competitiveness. However, comparisons among those universities suggest that despite the relative degree of efficiency, more investment did not ensure better university performance. Guidelines for allocating funding should be regularly revised in order to reflect any changes in relevant conditions and in universities’ overall performance and efficiency.

This study considers patterns of participation according to gender in post-mass higher education from the perspective of higher education expansion in Taiwan. Becker’s D coefficient (D) is used to detect the patterns of gender parity in a ‘critical mass’ field in higher education. The study compared participation in STEM and the humanities in terms of gender parity. ARIMA was used to build the best-fit model to project the future trends of D in both programs. The findings suggest that more females are entering higher education and that there are little gender differences in those entering STEM programs. The gender gaps shown by D in the humanities and in STEM are narrowing rapidly in both the elite and mass stage, but the gap in the universal stage shows little change. The findings provide patterns of gender parity in different programs to interpret the effect of higher education expansion.

Goal: The use of mobile game-based learning with a mobile app in higher education aims to provide an interesting learning method which is acceptable and workable for university students in different majors and different gender to improve their English vocabulary acquisition. Objective: To analyze how, and to what extent, mobile game-based learning influences the participants’ learning performance and learning motivational effects. Experimental Setting: A mobile application game was employed to learn English vocabulary for a hundred university freshmen students from one private university in Northern Taiwan during the spring semester, 2016. Method: A pre-questionnaire and pre-test were carried out before the participants started using the app game for learning. A post-test and post-questionnaire were completed and analyzed after the 2-week experiment. Results: This paper reveals that mobile game-based learning is a workable and acceptable learning method for both female and male university students from different faculties. The results indicate that language teachers could benefit from collecting mobile educational applications and implementing the teaching via technology model into ubiquitous learning activities. The improvement between the pre-test and post-test showed the students’ positive learning performance.