Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Faizan Khan. Including my home country of Pakistan, Canada is the fourth country in which I have been educated. After gaining some college credit at home, I started off my journey as an international student by pursuing an undergraduate degree in business in both the United States and Dubai. While there, I faced tremendous challenges on several levels. These challenges ranged from culture shock and adapting to a new environment to racial discrimination. At one point I found myself laughing out loud when I heard the Canadian comedian Russell Peters say that Middle Easterners were today’s blacks for what they have had to go through since 9/11. Read more...

By Fortune Sylivester. The Tanzania Commission for Universities, or TCU, has finally acted against a branch campus of Uganda’s Kampala International University, ordering the Dar es Salaam-based institution to stop offering masters and doctoral courses. This came after a lengthy outcry against the institution, which had been accused of mediocre administration and academic quality but had enjoyed operational tranquillity rarely experienced by its main campus in Uganda or branch campus in Kenya. The commission said that the decision had been taken because Kampala International University, or KIU, did not meet the requirements for offering courses at postgraduate level, but it could continue providing recognised undergraduate degree, diploma and other courses. Read more...

By Phil Honeywood. Globally, international education today faces many challenges. At the top of these challenges, however, is one key problem. We have a crisis of identity. The voting public, politicians and most civil servants do not understand who we are, what we do or where we fit in. A comparison of where Australia and the United Kingdom currently sit in the evolution of international education from being a sector to being both a sector and an industry throws up some interesting issues. There is clearly a desire on the part of many UK institutions to emulate Australia’s success in attracting significant tuition fee revenue, gaining international diversity within the student cohort and enhancing student mobility and research collaboration. Read more...

By Bindu N Lohani. Over the past three decades, Asia's extraordinary rise has been driven largely by its emergence as the world's low-cost, high-output factory. But as countries strive to become more diversified in facing strains on resources and changing workforces, building a knowledge economy is increasingly seen as the most sustainable way to drive growth while providing citizens with higher incomes and more fulfilling work. It is also the key to Asia realising its full potential this century and avoiding the ‘middle-income trap’ that has befallen other developing regions. Building a knowledge economy takes quality and accessible higher education, sound information infrastructure, better research and development, innovation, the right economic institutions and autonomy to collaborate and share information. Read more...

By Adam Tyson. Recently University World News carried a report on the call by the European Students' Union to scrap the proposed new European study loan guarantees and to use the funds instead for traditional Erasmus grants. The ‘Erasmus Master Student Loan Guarantee’ is one of the entirely new proposals to support the higher education sector – along with the extension of Erasmus mobility to the world and the creation of Knowledge Alliances to promote more intensive cooperation between higher education and business – in the European Commission's proposal for the next generation of education and training support, Erasmus for All.
Let us be clear. The Loan Guarantee is an entirely additional action. It will not replace traditional Erasmus grants for credit mobility, which will continue to be by far the largest part of Erasmus and which we will also expand in the new programme. The new mechanism responds to feedback from students and student groups, which highlights that finding adequate funding to take a full degree programme – as opposed to short-term Erasmus credit mobility – in another country is a real problem for many. Erasmus grants are currently around €250 (US$320) per month with an average duration of one semester. Read more...

By Carmen Paun. The consortium running the European Commission-backed U-Multirank is working to ensure the quality and reliability of the indicators it will use to measure universities, University World News has been told in an exclusive interview. Jordi Curell, director of higher education and international affairs in the commission’s directorate general for education and culture, said assessments were weakened by universities failing to monitor the professional success of their graduates.
“There is an issue because some of the indicators are difficult to obtain, for instance when it comes to the tracking of students, because they don’t exist everywhere,” he said of the new global ranking system that was officially launched in Dublin in January. U-Multirank aims to step out from the crowd of international university rankings by focusing not only on institutions’ research quality, as other rankings largely do, but also measuring teaching and learning, knowledge transfer, and the international orientation and regional engagement of participating universities. Read more...