Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin. Are we really serious when we say that schools should nurture creativity and other skills for innovation? An increasing number of countries see fostering of creativity and critical thinking as the next educational challenge: traditional good grades may no longer suffice to equip the workforce with the skills needed to fuel innovation-driven economic growth.
The recent international OECD-CCE-Singapore workshop gave 30 education decision-makers from 12 countries the opportunity to share the lessons from Asian educational initiatives aiming to foster pupils’ creativity and critical thinking. While most of these initiatives build on project-based, research-based, and other active pedagogies, some start to use design thinking methods to scaffold the learning of innovation skills. Read more...

The Torino Process, the ETF’s biannual review of vocational education and training in the partner countries, relies on a set of key indicators – the data which help measure the state of play and progress. How this information was collected and analysed? What are the conclusions? Here is the report.
The evidence assembled through the Torino Process is a barometer for policy development in education and training. If we can map demographic and economic trends, we can adjust human capital development to future needs. And if we can map the consequences of these adjustments we can better calibrate them to optimise education and training to the needs of society and the economy.
It sounds so blatantly obvious, but if gathering this evidence was easy, the Torino Process would not exist, except perhaps to benchmark national achievements against international trends.
Myriad of sources
The reality is that gathering this evidence is hard work. It calls for a lot of capable people who can analyse and translate data compiled by other capable people. This data must in turn be collected from a host of institutions of very different purpose and nature: sector councils, local authorities, employment agencies, schools, tax offices and many others.
At the ETF, the statistical team is the engine of data identification and collection under the Torino Process. Martiño Rubal Maseda was one of the six people involved in the definition and collection of the 2012 key indicators. “For us, the two greatest challenges of the process were first to simply get the data we wanted and second to get data that could be compared across different countries,” Rubal Maseda says. Read more...

The organisers of the Sixth Euro Mediterranean Dialogue of Public Management (MED 6) opened a new call for papers.
They look for the research and current work on public management in the Euro-Mediterranean area, especially on the theme "Cultures for change, changes through culture."
Proposals for papers (two-page summary in English or French) should be submitted by 10 June 2013.
The doctoral workshop will take place on October 9 at MED 6 conference in Marseille, France.
MED 6 is organized by European Group for Public Administration (EGPA), Institute of Public Management and Territorial Governance (IMPGT) - Aix Marseille University and National School of Administration, Strasbourg (ENA).
In September 2012 the ETF held a regional conference in Jordan in conjunction with Euro Mediterranean Dialogue of Public Management.
For more information: www.med-eu.org/2013.

To MOOCers and shakers in the world of higher education, the question about MOOCs now is not merely “to MOOC or not to MOOC”, but “how to MOOC strategically” when more and more universities are jumping onto the bandwagon of MOOCs. This month, the two major MOOC providers Coursera and edX both announced that they have successfully attracted many more institutions to partner with them. Coursera, in addition, has partnered with several major publishers, such as Macmillan Higher Education, SAGE and Oxford University Press, to provide teaching and learning materials to the students at no cost.
MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Courses. The massive coverage of discussions about MOOCs in the media, both pros and cons (see ACA Newsletter - Education Europe, February 2013), have convinced both enthusiasts and sceptics in the world of higher education that MOOCs, like global university rankings, are “here to stay”. More and more universities, including Yale University, which have been hesitant to join the MOOC race, are compelled to MOOC along with their peers. Believe it or not, MOOCs are all over the place, in the newspapers, in conferences, and even in university board meetings. According to a Gallup survey and some follow-up enquiries conducted by Inside Higher Ed, US university presidents are under increasing pressure to look into the impact of MOOCs on their “business model”. However, most of the presidents are sceptical about the potential of MOOCs in improving the learning of all students or solving colleges’ financial challenges, as opposed to the trustees from the business world who are keen to rush into the MOOC race.
On the other hand, some MOOC optimists continue to test the water. Georgia Institute of Technology, partnering with AT&T and Udacity Inc. (a private MOOC provider), has just announced a plan to offer a fee-paying MOOC master’s degree programme. Students formally “admitted” to the programme will pay a fraction (approx. USD 7 000 / EUR 5 500) of the tuition fee of the same on-campus offer to complete the programme online in roughly three years. The business model is built on a multi-track system, allowing all the learners to take the courses for free, while charging some others based on the credentials they desire to obtain. In other words, the students pay for the degree or credits rather than the content that they obtain online.
In the current MOOC race, the spotlight has been following the speed rather than the best. Being the first is all that matters to make a splash in the media. The rules of the game may soon change, however, with more MOOC players, including platforms and content-providers from all around the world, going into the field. By that time, perhaps it would not be a big surprise to see university rankers stepping into the scene to bring some order to the chaos. After all, global university rankings and MOOCs (in their current state) have involved more or less the same group of flagship universities, whereas MOOCs seem to provide exactly the missing indicators of “teaching quality” and “community engagement” that rankers have been searching for years. The future is difficult to predict. What is sure to happen on 10 October 2013 is ACA’s next policy seminar on MOOCs. Save the date and come MOOC with us.
EdX, Coursera, Georgia Institute of Technology, Inside Higher Ed.

For the second time, the international network of 24 research universities called Universitas 21 has published an overview of national higher education systems across the world. Rather than assessing individual universities, the U21 ranking brings in indicators that are seldom used in other rankings in an attempt to highlight the importance of a strong higher education environment. It is thus fighting the main criticism against global rankings, i.e. that the research output of elite universities cannot reflect the contribution of education to a country’s social and economic development.
Similar to the European Commission’s U-Multirank, the U21 ranking uses a large variety of criteria, divided into four broad measures: Resources, Environment, Connectivity and Output. In an holistic approach, it provides data on tertiary enrolment rates, the proportion of international students, international research collaboration, public and private funding, investment in research and development, output of research journal articles (per country and per head of population), ratio of researchers in the economy, etc. However, these criteria cannot be combined or singled out. In the 2013 U21 ranking, some 48 countries’ higher education systems were ranked according to those criteria. The top 1 country is the United States, followed by Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Australia, Singapore and the United Kingdom. These results are very similar to the 2012 U21 ranking (with the exception of Singapore replacing Norway, which now ranks 12th) and do not tell us much more than other rankings have been telling us.
One major flaw of the ranking, which Universitas 21 willingly admits, is the lack of a variable on the quality of teaching measures, due to the difficulty to collect data allowing a comparison across countries. Last year’s ranking also showed they had some problems measuring connectivity (see ACA Newsletter – Education Europe, May 2012). One could also deplore the small amount of countries analysed (50 out of a database of approximately 200), as developing countries in Africa or Latin America could benefit from the information withheld in such a ranking. Universitas 21.

Science in the focus of the German Year in Brazil
On 15 May 2013, DAAD President Prof. Margret Wintermantel together with the Federal President Joachim Gauk inaugurated the scientific programme of the German Year in Brazil. With a seminar for alumni on the occasion of the 40 years anniversary of the DAAD office in Rio de Janeiro, the career fair “Trained in Germany” as well as various other contributions, the DAAD is organising the scientific programme of the German Year under the slogan “Germany+Brazil 2013-2014: Where ideas connect”. Link (in German)
New DAAD information center in Jordan
This month the DAAD has opened an information center in Jordan. Through its presence in the capital Amman it will inform and consult on study opportunities in Germany. The new information center will support DAAD programmes in Jordan and will deepen the cooperation with the German Jordanian University (GJU). Link (in German). Read more...

The EAR, which stands for the European Area of Recognition, is a project co-funded by the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Commission and different national recognition information centres (ENIC NARICs). One of the main outcomes of the project is the EAR manual for higher education institutions (EAR HEI), a practical guide with standards and guidelines in the field of the recognition of foreign qualifications. A survey carried out in 2012 (see ACA Newsletter – Education Europe, May 2012) had already shown that especially admission officers were in need for a practical manual with recommendations for good practice. In 2013, the testing phase for the EAR recognition manual was successfully completed. Close to 450 institutions from over 30 countries responded to the survey conducted in March and April 2013. EAR project. NUFFIC. Read more...

The Finnish Centre for International Mobility (CIMO) is about to launch a new survey to measure the attitudes of tertiary education students during a study abroad period, and the way these attitudes change. In short: how students think about ‘difference‘ and how they engage with it. The survey has been developed together with Professor Vanessa Andreotti de Oliveira from the University of Oulu and her research team. The aim of the survey is to gain more profound knowledge on the effects of an international experience at individual level and will provide us with information on the impacts of international education. The Global Mindedness (GM) instrument is based on a distinction between three different ways in which individuals can think about and engage with ‘difference’. These are referred to as ‘dispositions’, in particular dispositions of Tourism, Empathy and Visiting. CIMO. Read more...