By Tim Dodd. Two influential vice-chancellors have renewed their push for “flexibility” in university fees to allow them to rise to boost funding for cash-strapped higher education institutions.

Writing in Monday’s The Australian Financial Review, Glyn Davis, the vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, and Greg Craven, the vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University (ACU), said the federal government’s review of the demand driven system for university funding should consider this option.

The two represent two different universities with very different interests, but they have found common cause on the fee issue. More...

By Jeannie Rea (NTEU National Office). If you haven't registered for the NTEU General Staff Conference in Adelaide, you've got until Friday: http://www.nteu.org.au/events/general_staff_conference_2013/registrationWe would particularly like to see more general and professional staff from university libraries, IT, technical, equity and diversity and teaching and learning centres register.
This conference will expand the conversation and research on the contribution that general staff make to higher education.

The Delegation of the European Union (EU) to Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam and ASEAN held a two-day European Higher Education Fair (EHEF) to respond to increases in the number of Indonesian people who are interested to study in Europe.
The delegation’s head of cooperation, Franck Viault, said Europe, with a wide variety of countries and cultures and a large number of universities, had continued to improve its educational institutions. More...

By Kelly Ng. More organisations in Asia are joining the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform to provide web-based education aimed at large-scale interactive participation and open access via the internet.
Last month, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), one of the biggest universities in Singapore with 33,500 students, repackaged ‘Introduction to Forensic Science’ as a free online course for anyone in the world. More...

By Liu Jiayi.The massive open online course site forms partnership with China's open.163.com, social media site Guokr, and online translator community Yeeyan, to extend its online courses to the Chinese market. Online education services provider Coursera has partnered China's open.163.com to offer massive open online courses (MOOCs) in the Chinese market. Itself a MOOC site established by two computer science professors from Standford University, Coursera hopes the partnership will provide Chinese consumers better access to its content on one of China's most popular MOOC sites, open.163.com, which also hosts videos from TED and Khan Academy, reported Ctocio. More...