By Brian Keeley. Few people can have been very surprised when the IMF announced this week that it was lowering its growth projections for this year. It feels like that’s been the story of the recovery in much of the OECD – a succession of disappointments and dashed hopes. Today, seven years after the financial crisis, growth remains well below where it was pre-crisis and unemployment well above. More...

By Laurent Bossard. The attacks that took place in Paris on 7, 8 and 9 January are part of a global, complex, diffuse and multi-faceted threat of which the bloodiest zones of action are presently in the Middle East and Africa, including within the confines of the Maghreb and the Sahel. The emergence of Salafist Jihadism in this area dates back to the early 2000s. When the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) moved further south and jihadists arrived from Afghanistan and Pakistan following the events of 11 September 2001, terrorist activities quickly merged with the trafficking of weapons, drugs, cigarettes and human beings. More...

The Bavarian Research Alliance (BayFOR) in cooperation with the European Commission is organising the international networking conference on the topic, “Mobilizing Universities of Applied Sciences for Horizon 2020”.
It aims to bring together the expertise of European Universities of Applied Sciences and informing them on how they can fully benefit from the opportunities created by Horizon 2020. For more information about this event and for registration, please click here. More...

The School of Engineering of the University of Orléans is organising the 43rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education. The theme of the conference this year is “Diversity in engineering education: facing new trends in engineering”.
The call for abstracts is now open and the deadline for submission is 2 February 2015. For further information, please visit the event website. More...

For the first time 23 higher education institutions, ENIC-NARICs and Ministries for Education from six countries are working together to overcome the challenges currently prevailing in recognition. The objective of the project is to identify the challenges at institutional level and find innovative ways to overcome them by applying the principles and practices outlined in the Pathfinder Group on Automatic recognition  and in the European Recognition Manual for Higher Education. To achieve this objective, institutions will be asked to participate in a two-step exercise: in the first place, they will describe their current recognition procedures and subsequently, with support of the ENIC-NARICs, they are expected to introduce improved and streamlined procedures at institutional level. More...

Following the recent completion of the coordinated evaluations in Romania, EUA’s Institutional Evaluation Programme (IEP) has finalised another national external evaluation exercise. In 2013 the Ministry of Education in Montenegro commissioned IEP to carry out coordinated evaluations of higher education institutions in the country during the course of 2014.
The full report can be downloaded here. More...