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Turkish universities should not hesitate to open their doors to more foreign scholars and students, President Abdullah Gül said during a speech at his eponymous university urging for the encouragement of increasing contact with other academic cultures.
“I will tell the Higher Education Board [YÖK] when I meet them. Don’t hesitate to bring more foreign students and scholars [to Turkey]. Quite on the contrary, let’s encourage it,” Gül said in his address during the start of the academic year at Abdullah Gül University in his hometown of Kayseri on Oct. 25. More...

By S.C. AS THIS week’s special report on the Koreas points out, South Korea’s education system is both inspiring and intimidating. The country’s 15-year-olds ranked fourth in science (excluding Shanghai and Hong Kong), second in maths and first in reading in the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Its youngsters (aged between 16 and 24) did equally well in the OECD’s international survey of adult skills, released this month. 
But South Korea’s enthusiasm for education has also been likened to a “fever”. Students spend long hours in hagwon, private cram schools, trying to outdo their peers in crucial exams and tests that have lasting consequences for their subsequent careers. In principle these tests are simply a measuring device, allowing universities and employers to rank students according to their underlying abilities. More...

MASSIVE open online courses, or MOOCs, offered by universities have the potential to shake up education. People yearn to learn, but many enroll on MOOC courses only to flunk out after a few lessons. MOOCs are ill-suited to their medium: they are long and lack interaction. That is why less formal alternatives are doing well. TED Talks have thrived. The video lectures, less than 20 minutes long and given by sharp suited penseurs, are devoured by a large audience keen to learn superficial facts about their world (Malcolm Gladwell, the pop science author recently savaged in our paper edition, is a star in the TED firmament). On the average commuter train, chances are that the young man in the flannel shirt and ankle boots peering at his iPhone is plugged into the latest TED Talk. More...

By Inge de Waard. In just five years’ time, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have sky rocketed in importance in the higher education world. Now, MOOCs are set to shake up the corporate and non-profit training worlds. The massive and open courses not only teach people, they bring learners together, provide networking opportunities and get a buzz going. More...