03 février 2013
Care, caution and the ‘credit hour’ conversation
By Judith S Eaton. The most recent conversation about ‘credit hour’, a description of time on task required of students in their courses, programmes and degrees, is about how this concept might be tied to student learning outcomes. It is also about the federal financing of higher education and sustaining the role that the credit hour has played in this funding. Discussion of student learning outcomes – setting expectations of student learning and judging whether expectations are achieved – has, to date, been led by the academy. And discussion of federal funding and the credit hour has been led by government officials, and focuses on what will be financed and how. Care and caution are essential as we proceed with both the student learning discussion and the federal financing discussion. Read more...
Move towards tuition fees for non-European students
By Jan Petter Myklebust and Ian R Dobson. On 21 December, more than half of Finland’s MPs agreed to a proposal to change legislation to allow for students from outside Europe to be charged tuition fees for degree programmes. The fees would be between €3,500 and €12,000 (US$4,700 and US$16,000) a year. Student unions have vigorously opposed the move and argued for keeping Finnish higher education fee-free for international students. The proposal to charge fees was put forward by four MPs from four parties and was supported by 119 of 200 MPs. Read more...Women struggle against institutional structures, entrenched attitudes
By Alya Mishra. In January India’s higher education regulatory body, the University Grants Commission, or UGC, set up a panel of top academics to prepare a blueprint aimed at making campuses around the country safer for women and more gender sensitive. The move was a direct fallout of the brutal rape and murder of a 23-year-old medical student in Delhi on 16 December, which sparked major protests in the capital and elsewhere and left the government needing to show it was acting on women’s issues. Read more...Land pressure could threaten higher education hub status
By Yojana Sharma. When Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Leung Chun-Ying told a radio programme that land on a site understood to be earmarked for student accommodation in the Kowloon area would instead be partly used for private residential flats, students and teachers from Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) staged a number of demonstrations.HKBU had said it had been requesting the land near its main campus in Kowloon since 2005 to build student accommodation and a Chinese medicine school. Separately, Hong Kong’s administration had invited expressions of interest in 2011 from education institutions for 16 hectares of the 25-hectare Queen’s Hill site in Fanling, previously a British Army camp, close to the border with the Chinese city of Shenzhen. Read more...
Students explore non-credit study-abroad options in China
By Sarah King Head. A new report from the Institute of International Education (IIE) – US Students in China: Meeting the goals of the 100,000 Strong Initiative – has shown that US students are increasingly choosing to explore China’s higher educational offerings in a range of ways other than through traditional for-credit programmes. Over the past decade, the IIE’s Open Doors reports have demonstrated that the number of American students earning academic credit from their home universities for studying in China has risen on average by 18% each year. Indeed, China has come to rank not only fifth most popular country overall but also the most popular study-abroad destination outside Western Europe for this group of students since 2007. Read more...
Government rejects its own committee’s recommendations
By Geoff Maslen. More than a year ago, Australia’s federal government released the recommendations of a report it had commissioned on base funding of higher education. Among other findings, the report called for a boost in government spending on university teaching and learning. But last Monday – a public holiday to celebrate the founding of an English colony on Australian shores in 1788 – the government quietly announced that it had rejected the report’s key recommendations, in particular that all students should pay 40% of the cost of their courses and the government 60%. Read more...The MOOC juggernaut rolls on – And on
By Geoff Maslen. The current trajectory of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, is a movement from free online courses to fee-charging, credit-bearing programmes, according to a new report from the Observatory on Borderless Education. Prepared by Observatory Director William Lawton and research analyst Kris Lunt, the 3,700-word report says MOOCs have already become “inseparable from the questions of strategic positioning and money: investments, revenues, jobs”. The rapid spread of such courses suggests the impact on higher education will be prolonged, with fewer people ultimately employed in universities but with more students being taught. Read more...Universities alliance to tap overseas opportunities
By Adele Yung. Singapore’s top public universities have teamed up with private education providers, in a new alliance that will help them secure education and training opportunities overseas, starting with training civil servants in China.The top-rated National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Management University and Nanyang Polytechnic have joined with three vocational education and training providers, under the aegis of the external trade promotion agency International Enterprise Singapore – IE Singapore.
Called the Singapore Talent Development Alliance, it was launched by IE Singapore and the universities on 30 January, with China its first port of call. Read more...
France - Universities sign gender equality charter
ByJane Marshall. Gender parity in university governance, teaching and training on gender equality for students and university personnel, and promoting research into gender are among measures ratified last week by French government ministers and organisations representing higher education institutions. The Charter for Equality of Women and Men – Charte pour l’Égalité Femmes-Hommes – was signed on 28 January by Geneviève Fioraso and Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, minister for higher education and research and minister for women’s rights respectively, and the heads of the three conferences of university presidents (CPU), engineering schools (CDEFI) and grandes écoles (CGE), which together represent 300 higher education institutions. Read more...U-Multirank is launched, 500 universities expected to sign up
By Alan Osborn. A new university ranking system, U-Multirank, was officially launched by the European Union (EU) in Dublin on Wednesday, bringing a new and broader approach to the assessment of universities throughout the world. Some 500 universities worldwide are expected to sign up to U-Multirank, and the first results will be published in early 2014. U-Multirank will rate universities in five separate areas: reputation for research, quality of teaching and learning, international orientation, success in knowledge transfer – such as partnerships with businesses, and start-ups – and contribution to regional growth. The aim, said Androulla Vassiliou, the European commissioner for education, is to give students and institutions a clear picture of their performance across a range of important areas. Read more...
