By Audrey Armitage. As U.S. relations with Cuba begin to warm up, the historic changes are reaching the world of education. Five Cuban studentswill take the Test of English as a Foreign Language exam in Havana next week, marking the first time an American testing organization has offered these exams in the country.
Although the Educational Testing Service, the Princeton, New Jersey-based global nonprofit organization administering the exams, is "starting small" in staging the first TOEFL session, the organization sees the move to offer the exams as the beginning of a larger educational exchange. More...

Vietnam’s HE system over the past two decades rapidly expanded, and outpaced the evolution of the regulatory and legal framework (101 institutions in 1987 to 419 in 2012). Vietnam needed to avoid letting the HE system grow haphazardly, and setting up an organized system needed to be a priority. More...

By Kevin Holden. Universities in south China are taking the lead in an array of reforms aimed at making academic centers and scientific collaboration more international and more dynamic. Leaders of universities across southern Guangdong Province are expanding award schemes designed to recruit researchers and scientists who have obtained advanced degrees or taught in the United States or Europe. These measures are increasing openings for scholars trained abroad, and are helping globalize university faculties and joint scientific research. In the process, China is strengthening its position as a world power in science. More...

By Rhea Kelly. Four higher ed IT leaders discuss the "bring your own everything" phenomenon, its impact on teaching and learning, and its challenges and opportunities. More...

By Anne Keeling. University students believe they benefit from studying alongside people from other countries says a new survey commissioned by the UK’s Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) and the Higher Education Academy (HEA).
However, the report suggests that the benefits are clearer to international students and the survey suggests they also work harder than British students. More...

By Justin McCarthy. Americans are about as likely to rate the quality of education that community colleges offer as "excellent" or "good" (66%) as they are to rate four-year colleges this positively (70%). Americans are about half as likely to rate the quality of Internet-based college programs -- those offering online-only courses -- as excellent or good (36%). More...

By Ali Ünal. In the past year the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities (YTB) has provided scholarships for 5,000 foreign students from 182 countries to study in Turkey. The organization also deal with problems of Turkish communities abroad, mainly in Europe. More...

By Haikal Jalil and Lee Choon Fai. Efforts by the government to prop up local institutes of higher learning in international university rankings are beginning to pay off, Minister of Education II Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh told the Dewan Negara today.
Idris said Universiti Malaya (UM) had risen from position 32 to 29 in the QS Ranking Asia, while Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) had risen from 57 to 49, and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) from 66 to 61. More...

By Dipankar Gupta. There was a time when scoring 65% meant you were brilliant, and if you touched 70% then Einstein had better watch out! But today anything short of 100% in Higher Secondary does not guarantee admission to a department of choice in Delhi’s top colleges.
In economics, the GDP deflator is used to assess the imdipankapact of inflation on the pricing of goods and services. But what kind of deflator do we need to make sense of grade inflation in high school results?
Scoring 99% in English, once considered impossible, is not uncommon today. More...

By Quintin Rares. Australian universities are under attack from all sides. Our academic colleagues in prestigious overseas universities, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are putting all their lectures online for free. Other large institutions, such as Stanford, are offering qualifications online to people who previously could not have travelled halfway across the world, or who could not have afforded the training. More...