Journée professionnelle, Mardi 11 décembre 2012, 9h-16h30 à Aquitaine Cap Métiers
Au cours de l’année 2012, dix « Ateliers d’échanges de pratiques » ont été proposés par Aquitaine Cap Métiers aux professionnels du conseil et de l'accompagnement en contact avec des usagers (jeunes, adultes, salariés...).
Organisés dans chaque département d’Aquitaine, ces ateliers ont permis aux professionnels concernés de produire individuellement, et collectivement, une démarche réflexive sur la formalisation de leurs pratiques.
Ce cycle d’ateliers, qui est venu enrichir le programme de professionnalisation Cap Métiers Formation, se clôturera le mardi 11 décembre 2012 à Aquitaine Cap Métiers par une journée d’échanges (9h à 16h30) ouverte à l’ensemble des professionnels du conseil et de l’accompagnement.
Cette rencontre, animée par David Chapelle, consultant à DCH Conseil, sera entièrement consacrée à la restitution des différents ateliers et à la construction de pistes d’actions pour 2013.

By Alessio J.G. Brown, Executive Director, Global Economic Symposium (GES), and Dennis J. Snower, President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and Director of the GES. Global competition and the global financial crisis have put additional pressures on education programmes around the world. Radically new approaches to learning are now needed. A new wave of globalisation is under way, in which outsourcing and offshoring no longer just affect unskilled and manufacturing jobs, but also skilled and service sector jobs. This trend has put new demands on education and training systems around the world, because in this new wave of globalisation, education and skills will be key, in particular those skills that emphasise flexibility and the ability to cope with change.
The trouble is, many existing educational systems are not equipped to face these challenges. The current standard model of learning fits neither people’s diversity of talents and attitudes nor the demands of employers. Schools and universities in many countries, despite recent reforms, still focus on developing traditional cognitive skills, teaching narrow facts and solving routine problems with rules-based solutions. Policies put too much emphasis on secondary and tertiary education, and too little on early childhood education and family and social environments. How can conventional approaches be reformed? This is a major question and a source of much debate, but at the Global Economic Symposium (GES), an annual forum of leaders in policymaking, academia, business and civil society, three approaches were highlighted as necessary for addressing these challenges.
A first step is to make educational systems more flexible in scheduling and timing throughout life, and to refocus on “learning to learn” and solving sometimes novel problems. Current educational systems must be reformed to enable people to take more personal responsibility for their own and their children’s education and development. This could involve providing more courses that are flexible in time scheduling and spreading educational expenditure across people’s careers. It would also mean raising spending on lifelong learning to keep it at least in line with the extra tax revenues such learning would be expected to generate.
Skills development should not be restricted to schools and universities, but should extend from early childhood to old age, from families to school and university, to business, government entities and society at large. A more participatory learning process that features “learning to learn” and “learning by doing” should be emphasised. Active learning, based on student participation and taking initiatives, matters more for student potential than passive learning. Educators, especially in primary and secondary schools, should focus more heavily on developing students’ imagination, creativity, inventiveness, spontaneity, interaction, social abilities and communication skills, which will become ever more important for individuals to become competitive in the globalised service economy.
Schools must stimulate a child’s ability to solve new, non-routine problems, to combine different bodies of knowledge and to interact productively with others. In science classes, students should be encouraged to run experiments on their own, rather than sticking strictly to textbooks. This would require changes in school curricula and in the ways of testing and grading students, for example, involving more open-ended questions and presenting them with ill-defined problems with no simple answers. It could mean organising more group activities and grading the performance of the group, rather than that of the individual. The UK’s SPRinG (Social Pedagogic Research into Group-work) Programs, which develop group-work skills in primary schools, are shown to have a positive effect on children’s academic progress because children are also encouraged to learn to think independently of the group, and to be self-confident and self-critical when facing different challenges.
A second step is to invest in early childhood education. Any reform of the education system has to pay particular attention to preschool and elementary school education. Some countries lag behind in making early childhood education available to all children, yet it is the key to equal opportunity and achievement later in life. Investment in pre-schooling provides not only high returns throughout the education cycle—approximately 7–10% returns per annum, according to some studies—but boosts achievement levels among children from disadvantaged families. Early education must be tied closely to complementary family support. This aspect is highlighted by the experience of Finland, which leads in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) rankings: although formal school starts later in Finland than in most countries, learning benefits from strong family support.
Cognitive and emotional difficulties often emerge early in life, usually before schooling, and are difficult to correct later on. Family and social factors may be at play, which in turn influence classroom performance. That means that education policies should be complemented by family and social policies that provide support for disadvantaged families, help integrate immigrants, improve urban neighbourhoods and reduce rural poverty. One example is New Zealand’s Ministry of Education’s Early Childhood Education (ECE) Participation Program, which targets Maori and Pasifika children and children from underprivileged communities and includes subsidies, community participation projects, playgroups, and flexible and responsive home-based early childhood education. Financial assistance should be properly targeted and subject to conditions, to ensure that it really is used for the early education of children.
A third step is to reinvent education by using new technologies and e-learning tools. Information and communication technologies are the key driver of productivity growth and social change, yet there is a worldwide gap in educating professionals with these so-called “e-skills”. In particular, traditional curricula should be redesigned to allow a more efficient integration of e-learning materials into traditional paper-based methods. Learners should be taught not only how to use information and communication technologies (ICT) in a narrow sense, but also how to harness ICT as tools to help them to learn and think independently. They should be allowed to wander off the set learning path, to follow their own interests, and information search on the Internet or via integrated packages of e-learning materials, and be guided back along the learning path.
Open access repositories for educational resources and open fora—such as that provided by the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), a foundation in Brazil, or the worldwide open educational resources clearinghouse currently provided by the African Virtual University (AVU) and Utah State University’s Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, for example—should be established and made available so as to enlarge the scope and scale of educational resources that can be provided to all interested learners. Open fora provide more opportunities for users to act independently, as well as interact and discuss with users interested in the same topics, thereby increasing the depth and intensity of their learning. This partially dissolves the boundaries between teachers and learners, and increases the efficiency of knowledge transfer and knowledge diffusion. Open fora can also benefit poorer countries, where the likes of community radio, audio and mobile phones combine to produce clear education and training value. For inspiration, policymakers could look to the “Text2Teach program”, a partnership of telephone companies, content providers, business corporations, and education ministries which has helped to improve science teaching and student learning at elementary school in the Philippines, Indonesia, and some African countries.
Whether improving ICT in education means investing in state-of-the-art hardware and software, or simply getting the most out of older, affordable, equipment, the lesson is the same: the new globalisation wave is transforming the world and so education must evolve too. Policies that put more focus on individual flexibility in learning, early childhood education and e-technology in learning environments would be a smart step in the right direction.
See:
Baines, Ed, P. Blatchford and A.Chowne (2007), “Improving the effectiveness of collaborative group work in primary schools: effects on science attainment”, British Educational Research Journal, Vol 33, No 5, pp. 663- 680, London.
Heckman, J., S. H. Moon, R.Pinto, P. A. Savelyev and A. Yavitz (2010), “The rate of return to the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program”, Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, No 94, pp. 114-128, New York.
Hwang, D-J., H-K. Yang and H. Kim (2010), “E-Learning in the Republic of Korea”, UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education, Moscow, Russian Federation.
“Global Economic Solutions: Proposals from the Global Economic Symposium (GES) (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011)”, Kiel Institute for the World Economy, www.global-economic-symposium.org
See also:
New Zealand’s Ministry of Education’s Early Childhood Education (ECE) Participation Program
The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa)
The Brazilian Fundação Getulio Vargas.

University rankings sell a lot of newspapers and magazines. But how seriously should teachers, students and, importantly, policy makers take them?
While there are many national rankings of higher education institutions, it is the small number of international rankings that attract the greatest media attention. Of these, the annual Academic Ranking of World Universities (known as the “Shanghai ranking”) is arguably the best known, although the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and the QS World University Rankings® also create a stir when they are published each year.
While based on different criteria, all three have at least 15 US research universities in the top 25 and there are five institutions– Cambridge, Chicago, Harvard, MIT and Oxford–that appear in the top ten positions in all three. The most heavily weighted factors in each ranking are related to the institution’s research output rather than to how well they teach.
This may be one drawback to watch out for in trying to make a complete assessment. Indeed, the effect of these rankings has been to focus attention on both the “best” universities and how to create and sustain them, rather than on how to improve the quality of higher education more broadly. UNESCO has been sufficiently concerned about this development that it co-organised, along with the OECD and the World Bank, an international Forum on Rankings and Accountability in Higher Education in May 2011.
It is increasingly recognised that research output is not the only, or even the best, measure, and that the other activities in which universities are involved–notably teaching, but also technology transfer and community engagement–matter just as much, if not more, to the quality of the education provided. But as of now, there is no way to measure the quality and impact of these activities comparably.
In the meantime, the OECD’s Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) initiative is showing that graduate learning outcomes can be evaluated. And the European Commission is developing a tool that will enable users to rank institutions according to six aspects, and against a number of indicators, depending on the users’ priorities and preferences. Visit www.oecd.org/edu/ahelo.
See also:
The Academic Ranking of World Universities.
The Times Higher Education World University Rankings
The QS World University Rankings
The Global Forum on Rankings and Accountability in Higher Education: Uses and Misuses, Paris, 16-17 May 2011.

Date: 29 Jan 2013. Start Time: 10:30 am. Location/venue: University of Surrey. This event is being hosted as part of the Higher Education Academy's Workshop and Seminar Series 2012/2013.
Information about the event
Extant research on processes of internationalisation within higher education has highlighted important inequalities. Students from more privileged homes have been shown to be much more likely than their peers to be internationally mobile; some international students suffer racism and other forms of discrimination; and there are considerable disparities between nations in the income derived from international student mobility and other forms of internationalisation. However, there remain significant gaps in our knowledge. We know relatively little, for example, about the impact on students of transnational programmes, which are offered by UK universities and delivered – at least partially – overseas. Moreover, there has been little work that has compared the impact of different forms of internationalisation. For example, do organised forms of student mobility encourage those who would be unlikely to move abroad under their own initiative (i.e. through spontaneous mobility)? Furthermore, while academic research has been effective in highlighting some of the inequalities which can often be exacerbated by international student mobility, there has been considerably less work on the action that can be taken by policymakers, university leaders and those who teach within higher education institutions to redress these problems.
This seminar will contribute to our understanding in this area by bringing together researchers, lecturers and staff from university international offices to: (i) compare the issues of (in)equality raised by different types of internationalisation (i.e. spontaneous student mobility, organised student mobility and transnational programmes); and (ii) on the basis of this analysis, consider how all those involved in international higher education can promote greater equality amongst students.
Aims/outcomes
The aims of the seminar are:
    To bring together researchers and higher education staff (lecturers and managers) with an interest in international education, and a commitment to promote equality between students.
    To disseminate findings from recent research that has focussed explicitly on issues of equality and inequality with respect to international higher education.
    To explore the implications of these research findings for policy and practice.
    To consider the similarities and differences (in relation to achieving equality) between different forms of international higher education (i.e. spontaneous student mobility, organised student mobility and transnational programmes in which students are not necessarily geographically mobile).
Information about sessions and speakers
The aim of this seminar is to explore the implications for policy and practice of recent research on (in)equality within international higher education. The seminar will comprise: (i) three presentations which will disseminate the findings of recent research on different aspects of international higher education; (ii) a panel discussion in which four practitioners will discuss the implications of the research findings for their own work; and (iii) a general discussion in which all seminar participants will be able to explore how equality can best be achieved in different types of international programmes and through their own work.
The three academic presentations will each focus on a different type of internationalisation. The first paper, by Dr Qing Gu (University of Nottingham), will consider equality issues raised by spontaneous student mobility (i.e. students who move on their own initiative, outside of any formal programme), with a particular focus on Chinese students who study in the UK. The second paper, by Dr Hannah Deakin (Loughborough University) will focus explicitly on organised student mobility - under the European Union’s Erasmus scheme. The final academic presentation will be given by Dr Johanna Waters (University of Birmingham) who will consider the issues of equality and inequality raised by transnational programmes (in which students themselves do not necessarily move) – drawing on a study of degrees offered by UK higher education institutions in Hong Kong.
Reflecting this diversity, the members of the panel will be drawn from members of staff who teach on, or manage, different types of international programme and who have experience of teaching international students in the UK. It is hoped that the seminar participants, more generally, will reflect a similar range of experiences (i.e. of spontaneous and organised student mobility, and of transnational programmes).

What is Open Apps?
Open Apps is the UOC's online environment that brings together innovative and successful experiences from the university in education and management and shares them in open access so that other institutions, users and developers can make use of them.  
Open Apps offers you,
- Teaching and management solutions and the documentation for implementing them.
- The code of the UOC applications, which are open source so you can develop, customize and improve them.
- The chance to participate by making comments and suggestions on the experiences available in the environment and sharing how you've used them.
Discover Open Apps and access the UOC's know how!
Context
From its inception, the UOC has developed and tested methodologies and technologies for finding solutions to meet the teaching and management challenges posed by its community of students, lecturers and management staff.
As part of an innovation programme (http://www.uoc.edu/) of the UOC's Support and Transfer Office (OSRT) (http://www.uoc.edu/), Open Apps is the result of this know how brought together as a virtual store of the successful experiences tested by the university. These experiences comprise a diverse range of products—including applications, management services and teaching procedures—but they all share one common characteristic: Owing to their innovative nature, they can be efficiently applied to other institutions by other users.
Objectives
The Open Apps portal aims to foster, within and outside of the UOC, the free use of the innovative applications and experiences created by the university. The specific objectives of Open Apps are to:
- Compile in the one environment all the UOC's teaching and management innovation along with the documentation required to implement and develop it.
- Spread the UOC's innovation and teaching model within and outside of the university.
- Help transfer knowledge and improve educational environments.
- Establish a framework for undergraduate and postgraduate final degree projects.
- Create a network of external collaborators.

EUCIS-LLL organised for the second time the Lifelong Learning Week. Its aim was to raise awareness on the social dimension of education and training, as the important factor to reach the headline targets of Europe 2020 in this field.
This year’s edition took place from 26-29 November 2012 under the title: “Rethinking skills: A civil society perspective”. Both EUCIS-LLL and its members presented public hearing, workshops and conferences around this topic during that week.
EUCIS-LLL thanks all participants of this year’s edition for their presence and contribution to the success of the LifeLong Learning Week 2012! A big thank you to the members that organised an event in the framework of the LifeLong Learning Week and to those that attended the events.
Find the pictures of all events on our FaceBook page! We will also post the reports and presentations of all events very soon on our webpage.

Europe has many hundreds of higher education institutions, renowned as centres of excellence around the world. However, higher education systems have traditionally been formulated at the national level. Increasing European integration is changing that, with the development of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) helping to reinforce the attractiveness of higher education in Europe.
The EHEA is a region with a world-class knowledge base and cutting-edge research facilities in internationally-renowned centres of excellence. This is what attracts hundreds of thousands of foreign students each year to study in Europe.
Increasing mobility and links between national higher education systems serve to reinforce this attraction. Foreign students coming to Europe can see for themselves the amazing diversity available to them (both inside and outside the university), while taking advantage of the smooth transferability of coursework, qualifications and research opportunities.

By Kirsti Miettinen, kirsti.miettinen@aalto.fi, Petri Lyytikäinen, petri.lyytikainen@aalto.fi, Tapio Koskinen, tapio.koskinen@aalto.fi, Aalto University Professional Development Aalto PRO. Companies that need training and development services increasingly operate in more than just one country, language and culture. Succeeding in a complex, multinational, customer-tailored training project takes more than a good concept. The concept must be flexible so that changes from country to country do not endanger the content to be delivered. There can be several localised versions of the training concept under simultaneous delivery. The challenge is how to manage the concept. Download the Document.
8. Training Partner Support Meets Multicultural Business Environment
Different business cultures and variations in company size from one country to another, as well as different learning and teaching cultures make the roll-out of courses very challenging. Furthermore, the need to deliver each course in the mother tongue of the participants makes it difficult to achieve the economies of scale.
The regional training partner has to be able to establish an open and firm relationship and dialogue with the local company management. It is necessary to have both parties communicating and planning the training together in order to understand what country-specific adjustments must be made in the training content. This increases the usefulness of the training. The risk is to make the training too country-specific and thus forget the overall picture i.e. harmonising the project business.
Too strong and wilful leadership in local customer organisation can make the implementation of the concept difficult. There is a risk that the training designed is not what they (country managers) think they need most. The training was intended to support the change management of the company. The training was to soften the adaptation of new ways of doing business. Resistance to the change direction can make them doubtful not only of the new concept but also of the training.
It is of utmost importance that already before the training starts, the country managers and the local champions (local owners of the concept) are committed to the new concept and procedure. Not only should the lingual translation of the Company’s new concept be ready before training in each country, but also the localisation should be finalized (by company in-house professionals). This cannot be overemphasised because we found lack of localisation being one of our major challenges during roll-outs.
The maturity of the business practices and normal cultural aspects in doing business can bring unexpected challenges to the delivery of the project. Issues that are easy to implement in one country can become difficult obstacles in another country. This requires a lot of time and energy from the regional partner and project management, if the difficulties had not been anticipated in time. A good understanding of the local business culture and open-mindedness to face unexpected challenges rising from e.g. resistance or misunderstanding of concepts are of great help when overcoming unexpected challenges. Continuous support for the regional partner from the central project management is a necessity. The best, and perhaps the only way, to ensure the quality of the training adaptation to the local level is to work only with subcontractors (local universities and training organisers) with whom you have had a long experience in collaboration. A long collaboration in training partnership with the customer makes it possible to acquire adequate and honest feedback for the training delivery abroad. Project management and the steering group are able to re-engineer a process control system on the run.
In our case, the major project management challenge came from the demanding roll-out schedule. When managing training carried out in 15 countries during 24 months and based on a concept designed and tested during a pilot phase in a couple of countries and re-engineered in every new country, you need to be active in keeping each partner updated on new amendments to the concept and content. It is also essential that your partners are flexible and ready to change their preliminary plans for delivery when the next generation concept is released. Download the Document.