Formation Continue du Supérieur

3 février 2013

Urgent need to strengthen university accreditation

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By Carlos Olivares. In recent weeks, the Chilean university community has been shaken by a scandal concerning the National Commission of Accreditation. The Prosecution Office surprised the public when it arrested the former president of the accreditation commission, two former rectors of private universities and the universities' owner. The charges are serious: money laundering, bribery and taking kickbacks. New investigations are under way to find out whether other university authorities were involved in these illicit activities. Read more...

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3 février 2013

A new phase in the battle for higher education

By Serhiy Kvit. At least three events that could influence the future of higher education have taken place recently in Ukraine. This influence could not only lead to a change in how the sector develops but also, quite possibly, will speed up its post-Soviet demise.
Elections to the Ukrainian parliament, held in October 2012, strengthened opposition forces – though they are still in the minority and unable to push through important decisions. Just before the New Year, cabinet approved the Draft Law on Higher Education mentioned in previous blogs. Nevertheless, its implementation is not a fait accompli, given the competing views of government and opposition members. Read more...

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3 février 2013

Quality assurance in a changing higher education world

By Karen MacGregor. The first annual meeting of the US Council for Higher Education Accreditation’s International Quality Group was held last week, with a focus on the open education movement, growth of online, competency-based education and learning outside the traditional university – major higher education trends worldwide.
The gathering explored issues in international higher education and their implications for quality assurance, academic corruption, ‘open badges’ and new ways of validating learning achievement, the open education movement including MOOCs, quality assurance in Central and Eastern Europe, and whether higher education is addressing economic and employment challenges.
What the meeting of the CHEA International Quality Group (CIQG) and the CHEA annual conference that preceded it tried to do, President Judith S Eaton told University World News, was “to focus on what the future is going to be like. Read more...

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3 février 2013

Care, caution and the ‘credit hour’ conversation

By Judith S Eaton. The most recent conversation about ‘credit hour’, a description of time on task required of students in their courses, programmes and degrees, is about how this concept might be tied to student learning outcomes. It is also about the federal financing of higher education and sustaining the role that the credit hour has played in this funding.
Discussion of student learning outcomes – setting expectations of student learning and judging whether expectations are achieved – has, to date, been led by the academy. And discussion of federal funding and the credit hour has been led by government officials, and focuses on what will be financed and how. Care and caution are essential as we proceed with both the student learning discussion and the federal financing discussion. Read more...

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3 février 2013

Move towards tuition fees for non-European students

By Jan Petter Myklebust and Ian R Dobson. On 21 December, more than half of Finland’s MPs agreed to a proposal to change legislation to allow for students from outside Europe to be charged tuition fees for degree programmes. The fees would be between €3,500 and €12,000 (US$4,700 and US$16,000) a year. Student unions have vigorously opposed the move and argued for keeping Finnish higher education fee-free for international students. The proposal to charge fees was put forward by four MPs from four parties and was supported by 119 of 200 MPs. Read more...

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3 février 2013

Women struggle against institutional structures, entrenched attitudes

By Alya Mishra. In January India’s higher education regulatory body, the University Grants Commission, or UGC, set up a panel of top academics to prepare a blueprint aimed at making campuses around the country safer for women and more gender sensitive. The move was a direct fallout of the brutal rape and murder of a 23-year-old medical student in Delhi on 16 December, which sparked major protests in the capital and elsewhere and left the government needing to show it was acting on women’s issues. Read more...

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3 février 2013

Land pressure could threaten higher education hub status

By Yojana Sharma. When Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Leung Chun-Ying told a radio programme that land on a site understood to be earmarked for student accommodation in the Kowloon area would instead be partly used for private residential flats, students and teachers from Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) staged a number of demonstrations.
HKBU had said it had been requesting the land near its main campus in Kowloon since 2005 to build student accommodation and a Chinese medicine school. Separately, Hong Kong’s administration had invited expressions of interest in 2011 from education institutions for 16 hectares of the 25-hectare Queen’s Hill site in Fanling, previously a British Army camp, close to the border with the Chinese city of Shenzhen. Read more...

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3 février 2013

Students explore non-credit study-abroad options in China

By Sarah King Head. A new report from the Institute of International Education (IIE) – US Students in China: Meeting the goals of the 100,000 Strong Initiative – has shown that US students are increasingly choosing to explore China’s higher educational offerings in a range of ways other than through traditional for-credit programmes.
Over the past decade, the IIE’s Open Doors reports have demonstrated that the number of American students earning academic credit from their home universities for studying in China has risen on average by 18% each year. Indeed, China has come to rank not only fifth most popular country overall but also the most popular study-abroad destination outside Western Europe for this group of students since 2007. Read more...

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3 février 2013

Government rejects its own committee’s recommendations

By Geoff Maslen. More than a year ago, Australia’s federal government released the recommendations of a report it had commissioned on base funding of higher education. Among other findings, the report called for a boost in government spending on university teaching and learning. But last Monday – a public holiday to celebrate the founding of an English colony on Australian shores in 1788 – the government quietly announced that it had rejected the report’s key recommendations, in particular that all students should pay 40% of the cost of their courses and the government 60%. Read more...

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3 février 2013

The MOOC juggernaut rolls on – And on

By Geoff Maslen. The current trajectory of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, is a movement from free online courses to fee-charging, credit-bearing programmes, according to a new report from the Observatory on Borderless Education. Prepared by Observatory Director William Lawton and research analyst Kris Lunt, the 3,700-word report says MOOCs have already become “inseparable from the questions of strategic positioning and money: investments, revenues, jobs”. The rapid spread of such courses suggests the impact on higher education will be prolonged, with fewer people ultimately employed in universities but with more students being taught. Read more...

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