NEWS: Our correspondents worldwide report

Brendan O'Malley

Countries should step up their investment in long-term research and development to develop frontier technologies that will reshape industry, healthcare and communications and provide urgently needed solutions to global challenges like climate change, according to a new OECD report. And long-term basic research, which is mostly carried out by universities and government institutes, has a vital role to play, the report says.

Sharon Dell

After a week of mounting countrywide protests, South African university students will not be paying more for tuition next year. And they will be given extra time to write their end-of-year examinations. But the push for free higher education for poor students is far from over.

Jan Petter Myklebust

The government is to phase out its Quota Scheme for international mobility and plough 40% of the money saved into two-way institutional collaborations and research collaborations with BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – and Japan.

Yojana Sharma

As Yale-NUS College – the flagship liberal arts programme in Asia run by Yale and the National University of Singapore – inaugurated its new campus with three residential colleges this month, there have been rumblings of discontent over the course content.

Linda Yeung

Ashoka University, a new private liberal arts university in India, is expanding collaborations with Yale University, strengthening a collaboration that began five years ago, before Ashoka admitted its first student cohort in 2014. It could eventually become a basis for a college on the lines of Yale’s collaboration with Singapore, according to observers.

Wagdy Sawahel

In an apparent violation of academic and other freedoms, Morocco’s government has allegedly prevented historian Maati Monjib from travelling to take part in conferences in Europe. Now the academic, human rights activist and writer is struggling for his life, more than two weeks into a hunger strike protesting against the government’s treatment of him.

Wagdy Sawahel

Egypt is to establish a Higher Education Regulatory Funding Authority in collaboration with the United Kingdom. The aim is to create an improved and more autonomous higher education system.

Ellen Wexler, The Chronicle of Higher Education

In 2011 there were fewer than 10 massive open online courses, or MOOCs, worldwide. Today there are nearly 4,000 and while the hype has died down, the interest continues to rise. In 2015 the number of new students registered on MOOCs is equivalent to the previous three years combined.

Michael Gardner

Germany’s Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen is now facing allegations of having violated ethical principles for research on human beings during her doctorate. Von der Leyen’s dissertation is currently under review for alleged plagiarism.

26th ICDE WORLD CONFERENCE

There were 900 delegates from 67 countries at the 26th International Council for Open and Distance Education, or ICDE, World Conference held in South Africa from 14 to 16 October. Open, distance and e-learning’s major global gathering was hosted by the University of South Africa under the theme “Growing Capacities for Sustainable Distance e-Learning Provision”.

Karen MacGregor

This has been the ‘Year of Education’, with a flurry of global policy statements key to online, open and flexible education, said Gard Titlestad, secretary general of the International Council for Open and Distance Education. At a High Level Policy Forum, 130 leaders and policy-makers went a step further, identifying actions that would help higher education to meet the new United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Sungula Nkabinde

The future of technology is being shaped in Silicon Valley and California’s global innovation hub will thus dictate the evolution of education technology. The digital revolution and the ‘sharing economy’ mean education will become more accessible, but education technology writer Audrey Watters believes that does not necessarily bode well for the greater good that is the transfer of knowledge to the world’s most economically vulnerable people.

Munyaradzi Makoni

As societies change, so must leadership. Today’s higher education leaders must be ready to adapt to the new era of fast-paced technology, and to understand and engage in the complex environment in which it operates. Reputation and connectedness will be real assets, according to Harold Jarche, an internationally renowned expert on workplace transformation.

Munyaradzi Makoni

MOOCs – massive open online courses – have the potential to build new learning pathways. Governments, universities and stakeholders have a duty to scrutinise how the opportunities MOOCs offer can best be harnessed for development, the International Council for Open and Distance Education conference heard.

Karen MacGregor

An ‘operational network’ that stretches across the world and will offer regional support structures for open, distance and e-learning institutions was launched on the final day of the biennial conference of the International Council for Open and Distance Education.

Sungula Nkabinde

Educators have no doubt over the efficacy and need for learning analytics, but the invasion of privacy that it entails makes it an ethically grey area – because more often than not, the data is collected without students’ knowledge or consent. This is overlooked supposedly because it is done in the interest of better education.

Stephen Coan

Given the competitive environment of higher education, institutions need to improve student retention and success and attract high-performing students while ensuring their employability, according to Jon Baldwin, managing director of market development for Tribal. Analytics can be key in responding to these imperatives.

Stephen Coan

While universities and other tertiary institutions increasingly expand their e-learning and online capacities, they often fail to back up the educational technology with adequate lecturer knowledge to deliver it effectively and sustainably.

Munyaradzi Makoni

When it comes to university league tables, open and distance learning providers are getting a raw deal, said experts at the International Council for Open and Distance Education conference. “We feel pushed by the current rankings,” said Albert Sangrà, UNESCO chair in education and technology for social change at the Open University of Catalonia in Spain.

COMMENTARY

Ellen Hazelkorn

Science education requires a whole-of-education and whole-of-society approach. Citizens should be assisted to continually refresh their understanding so they can participate actively and responsibly in science-informed decision-making and knowledge-based innovation.

Nico Jooste and Savo Heleta

The parameters of the debate on the internationalisation of higher education have been dominated by the North. We need a global commons where power dynamics are neutralised in order to encourage true collaboration.

Bob Kinnaird

International education policies should be targeted at wealthier students who are less at risk of exploitation by employers looking to undercut domestic wages and work visas should be restricted.

Ly Tran and Cate Gribble

Rather than viewing international students as taking jobs from young Australians, the benefits of international education must be showcased to the wider Australian community.

Chika Sehoole and James Otieno Jowi

The 6th annual conference of the African Network for Internationalization of Education was held just a week after ratification of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. African universities were urged to position themselves to contribute to meeting the global goals through partnerships.

WORLD BLOG

Grace Karram Stephenson

Universities should not have the sole rights on research and may have something to learn from how polytechnics have forged partnerships with business.

FEATURES

Yojana Sharma

Yojana Sharma talks to International Association of Universities President Dzulkifli Abdul Razak about higher education institutions' role in helping refugees and migrants and contributing to sustainable development, and about his concept of higher education for a single planet.

Wachira Kigotho

The marginalisation of social sciences and humanities in African universities has radically stifled scholarship, according to CODESRIA – the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa. At a workshop in Nairobi, scholars from the diaspora and from Sub-Saharan Africa heard that this had narrowed the region’s view on development.

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WORLD ROUND-UP

Saudi students face racial discrimination at a number of European universities, a Saudi diplomat has alleged, writes Sounak Mukhopadhyay for International Business Times.

A total of 43 of the 86 national universities are set to carry out structural reforms, such as establishing new faculties and realigning existing ones, in the six years from fiscal 2016, reports Jiji Press.

Officials at Myanmar’s 169 colleges and universities are busy drafting charters for their respective institutions, which will allow them to be self-governing starting from the upcoming academic year, writes May Thinzar Naing for Myanmar Times.

A new report says that more than £500 million (US$770 million) should be taken from UK universities in the Spending Review and given to further education, or FE, colleges to improve training for engineers, technicians and skilled construction workers, writes Sarah Cassidy for the Independent.

Apple has won patent infringement lawsuits against other companies, but its loss on 16 October to a university could have significant impacts on other university researchers concerned about their intellectual property rights, writes Lucy Schouten for The Christian Science Monitor.

A leading academic has warned that elite Australian universities are more concerned with protecting their reputation than dealing with sexual harassment and assault, write Henrietta Cook and Bridie Smith for The Sydney Morning Herald.

Students took to the streets of Paris recently to protest against the sorry state of French universities, which are suffering from overcrowding and a chronic lack of funding, reports The Local.

When the Open University announced last month that it would be closing seven of its nine regional centres in England, it said it was a response to the changing demands of students, rather than funding. But staff say abandoning many of the opportunities for face-to-face contact and support will change the OU’s ethos, writes Harriet Swain for the Guardian.

The chair of the University of British Columbia's board of governors, John Montalbano, has resigned in the wake of a report which found the university failed to protect a professor's academic freedom, reports Jason Proctor for CBC News.

Fears of corporate influence on higher education are nothing new. But are colleges and universities, which receive smaller and smaller shares of their budgets from public funding, and which have struggled to bounce back from the 2008 recession, more likely to accept gifts with ideological strings attached than they would have been previously? asks Colleen Flaherty for Inside Higher Ed.

Both Gayatri Ganesh, director of development at the Christian Hospital, a rural hospital in Mungeli, India, and Paolo Pagaduan, a project manager with the World Wildlife Fund in the Philippines, have signed up for courses at the new non-profit group Philanthropy University, started by Amr Al-Dabbagh, a Saudi businessman and philanthropist, writes Paul Sullivan for The New York Times.

A study of more than 22,000 university staff shows that academics in regional universities were more likely to experience bullying compared to those at other types of universities, writes Timothy Charles Skinner for The Conversation.

A new study examining the economics of public research universities found that at least 11 states spend more on locking up citizens than educating them, writes Carl Stoffers for New York Daily News.

The Hong Kong government should provide incentives for students to study innovation and technology-related disciplines so local universities can remain competitive. This is the view of City University of Hong Kong President Professor Kuo Way, writes Shirley Zhao for South China Morning Post.

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