16 March 2023  Issue No: 397

On the sidelines of the recent Reinventing Higher Education conference held in Cape Town, South Africa, two academics flesh out what upending the ‘unidirectional gaze’ that characterises existing North-South research collaborations might practically mean for universities, institutions and academics in the Global North.

South Africa is facing a visa crisis which is affecting students and universities. The country needs officials who can process applications quickly and with the utmost professionalism. The support of the government is needed to streamline and increase transparency in visa processes to prevent higher education internationalisation from being undermined.

The University of the Free State in central South Africa has produced its first carbon footprint report for 2022, with data collected from the institution’s operations in 2021. Carbon reporting is seen as a critical aspect of the university’s efforts to combat global warming and achieve environmental sustainability.

Just over a month ago, Senegalese Professor Mouhamed Moustapha Fall was named the 2022 winner of the Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians in Developing Countries. On International Day of Mathematics, observed on 14 March, he spoke to University World News about his research and community work.

The Ethiopian Ministry of Education is considering the digitalisation of school-leaving and university exit exams to counter corruption and cheating in the sector. But a national strategy is necessary to address challenges associated with a digital exam, such as the availability of infrastructure and IT facilities as well as security needs.

Universities in Africa should establish research data repositories to archive important information gathered over time for posterity purposes, an important tool that can serve as an alternative to and complement open-access publishing, a webinar on ‘Understanding Open Science and Research Data Management’ heard.

Stakeholders, including academics, researchers and policy-makers in Tanzania, intend to adopt open science and present the plan to the government and implementation partners for funding. However, the decision to make research more accessible means they also have to deal with several challenges.

This is part of a weekly University World News special report series on ‘AI and higher education’. The focus is on how universities are engaging with ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence tools. The articles from academics and our journalists around the world are exploring developments and university work in AI that have implications for higher education institutions and systems, students and staff, and teaching, learning and research.

Nothing short of a human revolution would be an appropriate response to the depths of the multiple crises humanity faces. Yet universities are legacies of an era of monastic, hierarchical and siloed teaching and learning approaches. How can they be reinvented to become transformative?

Co-creation is one of the main megatrends across industries. It makes sense that a product, policy or framework is developed in collaboration with stakeholders and tailored to their context. So how can universities and policy-makers work together to co-create innovative higher education policy?

The proportion of women researchers in Europe has moderately increased in the past two decades to 33% pre-pandemic, up from 30%. However institutional and cultural barriers still remain, despite new initiatives that include Horizon Europe’s requirement for applicants for funding to have a gender equity plan.