In a flurry of recent international meetings of education policy-makers and university leaders, China is deepening its higher education links with Europe. A more in-depth relationship would include a stronger focus on understanding the management and governance of public universities to enable increased international collaboration.
GLOBAL
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.
LATIN AMERICA
Less than a year after the Catholic church stripped a top Peruvian university of its association with the Vatican, educators in the region’s Catholic universities are encouraged by the choice of new pope.
UNITED STATES
Since the Boston Marathon bombings three weeks ago, the United States government has enacted just one significant security change: it has ordered increased scrutiny of international students coming into the country.
EUROPE
In 2010 there were 68,256 foreign students in the five Nordic countries. Foreign student numbers were up by 117% from 2005 and they comprised 5.8% of the total student population, according to a recent study.
HONG KONG
Hong Kong’s highly ranked universities have been magnets for students from the Chinese mainland. But there are fears that increases in fees for non-local students could put off some foreign students and jeopardise Hong Kong’s ambition of becoming a higher education hub.
VIETNAM
Vietnam is to invest some US$150 million to create a state-of-the-art university of technology in Hanoi. Russia is to be the academic sponsor, the Ministry of Education and Training announced. This is the latest in a series of partnerships forged with foreign governments and aimed at creating world-class universities.
SOUTH AFRICA
An innovative course that aims to produce a new generation of doctoral supervisors kicked off this year at three South African universities. The plan is to roll out the free course to other universities to raise the country’s PhD output.
JAPAN
It is bitterly ironic – Japan has the third largest economy in the world and is a leading exporter, but fails badly when it comes to international education. Experts have called for less bureaucracy and for curriculum reform to kickstart international engagement.
PAKISTAN
Bogus degrees are a problem worldwide, and Pakistan is certainly no exception. Following extensive media coverage, politicians are being prosecuted for possessing fake degrees – but no action is being taken against those who issued the ‘qualifications’ or were responsible for verifying them.
UNITED STATES
When she learned that two bombs had been detonated at the Boston Marathon, one thought crossed Ifrah Inam's mind: "Oh God, don't let it be a Muslim."
SOUTH AFRICA
The discovery of a mysterious human skull in an obsolete department at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa has exposed links to Nazi Germany and led to a groundbreaking new ‘racism in science’ research project by the faculty of arts and social sciences.
SOUTH AFRICA
South Africa needs to escalate its expenditure on research and development and increase its international competitiveness, said Science and Technology Minister Derek Hanekom. Disappointingly, the lofty goal of raising R&D spending to 1% of gross domestic product by 2010 has not been achieved.
ASIA
Naubahar Sharif has been teaching for some years at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He drew on his lectures to develop a massive open online course, or MOOC, on “Science, Technology and Society in China”, and this month it was launched on the Coursera platform – billed as Asia’s first MOOC.
EUROPE
Copenhagen University is to offer four initial MOOCs. Already 40,000 students have registered for the courses starting in September and 100,000 are expected. MOOCS are beginning to take off in European higher education.
UNITED STATES
Many of the boldest experiments in higher education these days are led by a relatively new kind of business leader: the social entrepreneur. The founders of Coursera proudly claim the label, stressing their lack of concern about a business plan as they set up free online courses from top colleges.
EUROPE
This month’s annual conference of the European University Association debated how rankings systems needed to become more sophisticated benchmarking exercises, as higher education worldwide becomes ever more internationalised.
MALAYSIA
The Malaysian agency set up earlier this year to promote the country as a higher education hub says it will concentrate on boosting foreign student numbers, particularly from South East Asian and Gulf countries.
GLOBAL
Do the world’s leading universities have a role to play in alleviating the plight of the 1.3 billion people living with extreme poverty and hunger on incomes of less than US$1.25 a day while a further five billion people live on less than $9 per day? The question was raised last Thursday by Cambridge University Vice-chancellor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz.
UNITED STATES
Scholars continue to get more comfortable with e-only journals, and they increasingly get access to the material they want via digital channels, including internet search engines and more specific discovery tools provided by academic libraries.
GLOBAL
When Nigerian Francisca Nneka Okeke was a child, she would wonder about the changing colour of the sky and the ability of aeroplanes to fly in the atmosphere without plummeting back to Earth. Today she is a laureate of the L’Oréal-UNESCO Award For Women in Science.
SOUTH AFRICA
It is rare for students to speak out about sexual harassment at South African universities and so the problem often goes unrecognised. But investigation into a sex scandal that has rocked the University of the Witwatersrand has brought the subject under the spotlight.
GLOBAL
As more universities around the world graduate ever-increasing numbers of students with PhDs, governments are beginning to ask if it is time to slow the production line. A new study notes that China is the world leader in producing PhDs, having outnumbered the US for the first time in 2008.
EUROPE
A complex picture of the policies and strategies of European countries and universities to attract international students is painted by a new report from the European Commission. It reveals “great interest” in growing ties with emerging economies through their students, and that 75% of international courses in The Netherlands are now taught in English.
VIETNAM
Hai Tran never imagined, when he waved farewell to his parents at the boarding gate of Vietnam’s Noi Bai airport in 1998 to study information technology at a Russian university, that it was the start of a 15-year adventure in several foreign countries.
