By Kris Olds. Editor's note: this guest entry in GlobalHigherEd has been kindly developed by Jurjen van Rees. His entry is a backgrounder to the development of a fascinating new initiative - Amsterdam Metropolitan Solutions - slated to involve both Dutch and foreign universities. This development should be viewed in the context of recent initiatives to establish new applied sciences universities and research centers in New York (most notably Cornell Tech in New York City, which I profiled in February 2012 in 'Unsettling the University-Territory Relationship via Applied Sciences NYC') and Singapore (via the Campus for Research Excellence And Technological Enterprise (CREATE)). For broader context on the Amsterdam city-region, see the OECD Territorial Reviews: Randstad Holland, Netherlands (2007) and OECD/IMHE Reviews of Higher Education in Regional and City Development: Amsterdam (2009). Read more...

By Elizabeth Redden. In Germany the great experiment with tuition fees is coming to an end. Seven of the 16 states introduced tuition fees after a federal court ruling in 2005 freed them to do so, but one by one they have undone them. The last two states to charge tuition fees, Bavaria and Lower Saxony, are expected to abolish them in the coming months, making Germany an outlier amid a global trend toward the introduction and increase of tuition fees.
Tuition fees in Germany are by an American standard modest --  €1,000, or about $1,300, per year -- but the imposition of them in a country with a tradition of “free” public higher education has proven politically divisive. The more conservative Christian Democratic Union and Free Democratic Party have championed tuition fees, while the leftist Social Democratic and Green Parties have brought about their revocation. The German Rectors’ Conference, the association of universities, supports modest tuition fees, while the student and faculty unions stand opposed. Read more...

By Elizabeth Redden. Wake Forest University is launching a new program for Chinese high school students intended to help “bridge the gap” between the Chinese and U.S. educational systems and provide students with "incontrovertible" video evidence of their academic readiness, which Wake Forest will send to college admissions offices on their behalf.
“Our notion was by going to the high schools and providing exposure to Western-style pedagogical practices, we’ll both have a better sense of who’s applying, at least in some cases, and we’ll have a head start on integrating students once they’re here,” said Rogan Kersh, Wake Forest’s provost. Read more...

ByJohn Warner. I’m failing my MOOC.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not learning anything.
I enrolled in Coursera’s “English Composition I” with the best of intentions. I’ve been writing about MOOCs, often critically, and thought I should experience massive, open, online learning for myself. I chose English Composition I because it’s a course I teach and I was curious to experience it from the student side of the equation.
So, six weeks ago, 60,000 classmates and I began watching the initial videos featuring our teacher, Prof. Denise Comer of Duke University. Professor Comer is no “sage on the screen,” but instead acts as a friendly and open guide, spending her time (in the initial videos at least) not lecturing, but talking directly into the camera from her office, Skype-style. Periodically, animated PowerPoint-ish slides serve as visual aids, not too different from what a student might experience in a lecture/discussion course in a traditional setting. Read more...

By Maria Yudkevich. “And they lived happily ever after.” No one should expect that it could be an appropriate start for a story about university mergers in Russia. On the contrary, as Jamil Salmi wrote recently, many merged universities  experience severe problems establishing a new identity and academic culture as well as challenges building new and efficient administrative structures for the core activities of the newly formed institutions. Read more...