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13 janvier 2013

China move may open floodgates

By David Matthews. Mainland recognition of foreign degrees taught in Hong Kong is key for UK, writes David Matthews.
Foreign degrees taught in Hong Kong are set to be recognised in mainland China, potentially opening up a huge new market for UK universities.
Chinese officials told delegates at a British Council conference in Beijing that they are close to expanding a mutual recognition agreement to cover overseas qualifications, which would attract more students from the mainland to study in the city.
UK institutions offer around 70 per cent of the overseas programmes taught in Hong Kong, the Quality Assurance of Degrees Awarded in a 3rd Country conference, held on 10 December, heard. Read more...

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13 janvier 2013

Higher education and the California budget: Brown's plan offers more money for colleges and universities

By Katy Murphy, Oakland Tribune. Gov. Jerry Brown's budget plan announced Thursday morning gives California's colleges and universities good news for the first time in years.
The CSU and UC systems would each receive an additional $125 million in funding for core instructional programs. It was less than they asked for, but far better than their outlook just a few months ago, before the passage of Propositions 30 and 39 in November. Those measures are expected to raise an additional $6 billion annually for the state. In addition, the two university systems will receive $125 million each next year, as promised, as part of a deal struck with the governor last year, pending the passage of Proposition 30.
The state's community colleges would receive $197 million more in general-purpose funds next year - money that will allow colleges to restore thousands of classes, said California Community Colleges Chancellor Brice Harris. Read more...

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13 janvier 2013

Coursera Announces Details for Selling Certificates and Verifying Identities

By Jeffrey R. Young. How is a major provider of free online courses going to tell whether you are who you say you are? By how you type.
The company, Coursera, plans to announce on Wednesday the start of a pilot project to check the identities of its students and offer “verified certificates” of completion, for a fee. A key part of that validation process will involve what Coursera officials call “keystroke biometrics”—analyzing each user’s pattern and rhythm of typing to serve as a kind of fingerprint.
The company has long said that it planned to bring in revenue by charging a fee to students who complete courses and want to prove that achievement. And Coursera has long recognized that its biggest challenge would be setting up a system to check identity. Other providers of free online courses, which are often called massive open online courses, or MOOCs, have decided to work with testing centers and to require students who want certificates to travel to a physical location, show an ID, and take tests while a proctor watches to prevent cheating. Read more...

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13 janvier 2013

The race for excellence – A marathon not a sprint

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By Jamil Salmi. What chance does a university stand to be among the best, if it does not have hundreds of years of experience? The top 10 universities in the Shanghai Jiao Tong Academic Ranking of World Universities (2011) were all founded before 1900, and two are more than eight centuries old. As is the case with good wines, academic excellence requires a wealth of expertise, care and a long maturity period. However, this notion has been challenged recently on several counts. First, the regular publication of annual global rankings appears to imply that significant progress could be expected from one year to the next. Second, the decision of several countries to step up investment in support of their elite universities, under various "Excellence Initiatives", shows their determination to obtain drastic improvement within a few years. Finally, several universities were recently created in emerging economies (such as Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia) with the declared ambition of rapidly becoming "world-class". Read more...

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13 janvier 2013

Wanted: Consumer guide to American higher education

By William Patrick Leonard. Since their beginning, the major tertiary ranking systems have attracted increasing readership and revenue for most of the publishers with each annual release. While their popularity has increased, their utility to parents and students considering study-abroad options has remained negligible at best. As noted in my previous blogs, a few marginally helpful rankings and-or comparable data sources have emerged in the United States market. They include The Alumni Factor, College Miner and Washington Monthly. Even with their exclusive US focus, in aggregate their coverage is hardly representative of the thousands of US institutions that would support detailed comparisons. Thus, many institutions that might merit serious consideration may be overlooked until a more comprehensive comparative data source emerges. Read more...

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13 janvier 2013

Higher education stakeholders to forge a 'social contract'

By Karen MacGregor. Higher education in Nigeria is in crisis and one of the causes is the lack of a ‘social contract’, according to a recent high-level policy dialogue. It resolved to hold a biannual summit involving all stakeholders in forging a common front aimed at tackling challenges facing the sector.
The biannual Nigerian Higher Education Summit will involve the federal and state governments, parliamentarians, regulatory bodies, institutions, higher education unions, student leaders, the business sector and civil society organisations, participants agreed. Read more...

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13 janvier 2013

Missed opportunities for university-business partnerships

By Chrissie Long. Education experts in Mexico say universities are not doing enough to collaborate with the private sector and that there is much untapped potential in research and development, consulting and teacher training. While most universities have some form of internship programme with nearby businesses and often collaborate in volunteer projects, experts believe these efforts fall short and that universities would benefit from strengthened relations with businesses. The recent National Study of Institutional Collaboration (ENAVI), which surveyed over 400 universities, found that only 18.36% work with businesses and organisations in teacher development, a mere 16.31% have small business incubators and 54.54% are involved in research and development. Read more...

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13 janvier 2013

Universities increasingly use Weibo social media to reach China students

By Yojana Sharma. Recent surveys of universities in the US, the UK and Australia have shown a rapid rise in the number of institutions using China’s most popular microblogging platform Sina Weibo to reach out to students in China and use social media as a tool for international recruitment.
Weibo, launched in 2009, now has some 400 million Chinese language users, according to statistics released in November by the company Sina, which operates the platform. This is a big jump from 300 million users in May 2012 and 200 million in August 2011.
Although it is not the only social media network in China – others are Renren and the less known Sohu and Tencent – Weibo is widely used in a country where media censorship is rife, and enables users to directly seek out information that may not be available publicly. Read more...

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13 janvier 2013

University-industry partnerships initiative launched

By Wagdy Sawahel. Lebanon and the European Union (EU) have launched a three-year partnership called IDEAL – Innovation and Development of Academic-Industry Partnerships through Efficient Research Administration in Lebanon – aimed at boosting research and development in universities.
The initiative, which is part of the EU's efforts to support the modernisation of higher education in the Middle East by enhancing collaboration, was officially launched at the American University of Beirut during a two-day meeting from 6-7 December 2012.
Funded by the EU's Tempus Programme and coordinated by the American University of Beirut (AUB), IDEAL will promote the role of higher education in development by helping universities to secure grants, manage projects and market innovative research that will enhance Lebanon’s research capacity and spur industrial innovation. Read more...

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13 janvier 2013

Anger over lean budget for public universities

By Tunde Fatunde. Public universities in Nigeria will face harsh financial times yet again this year. The National Assembly recently approved a paltry 8.7% of the nation’s entire budget for the education sector, and only around 3% of this low allocation will go to tertiary institutions. Stakeholders, including lecturers, students and non-teaching staff at public universities, have expressed disappointment at poor funding of the sector by a political class that has clearly not come to terms with the urgent need to invest massively in education, as the driving force of the knowledge economy.
Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Education has 22 specialised agencies and hundreds of civil servants in the ministry itself. It is in charge of 37 universities, 21 colleges of education, 48 mono- and polytechnics and 19 technical colleges. The budget also supports 104 unity secondary schools spread across the six geo-political zones of Nigeria. Read more...

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