- IPPR Report: Emerging University Models
- China: Online Course Gaining Popularity
- LATAM: HE in LATAM & The English Language
- Student Mobility: Deterred by Information Gaps
The ‘An Avalanche is Coming’ report published by the Institute for Public Policy Research emphasises that the university leaders need to take control of their own destiny and seize the opportunities open to them through technology – Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for example – to provide broader, deeper and more exciting education. Leaders will need to have a keen eye toward creating value for their students.Each university needs to be clear which niches or market segments it wants to serve and how. The traditional multi-purpose university with a combination of a range of degrees and a modestly effective research programme has had its day. The traditional university is being unbundled.Some will need to specialise in teaching alone – and move away from the traditional lecture to the multi-faced teaching possibilities now available:
• the elite university
• the mass university
• the niche university
• the local university
• the lifelong learning mechanism
The trend of learning through open online courses has made its way to China as more of the country’s top universities unveil public courses, and the first cross-university open class for college students in Shanghai kicked off on Tuesday night.The city’s university course-sharing platform formally began registering students from 30 schools in the municipality, and the course “Introduction to Philosophy,” offered by Professor Wang Defeng with Fudan University (FDU), became the first-ever cross-university public course, welcoming 1,072 students Tuesday. As a flagship university in China, PKU is posting lectures by prestigious professors online. “We’ve produced dozens of episodes and will work hard to increase quality and share it with the public,” said Zhou.
Some Latin American countries are dedicating important resources to internationalisation of their higher education systems. This has triggered a rapid response from institutions, associations and even governments from the developed world. Suddenly Latin American universities became regarded as important potential partners and everyone wants to cooperate, most with a greedy eye for tuition fees in times of crisis. But institutions with a strategic view should now be thinking about taking the opportunity to go beyond simply hosting exchange students.Latin Americans still confound higher education and university education and expect all their higher education institutions to be research institutions, although most do not do any relevant research of course. Latin American institutions (including universities) adopt the 19th-century continental European tradition of professional training.
Would-Be overseas students find the difficulty of obtaining reliable information more off-putting than the prospect of studying in different languages, a new British Council report suggests. The online survey of almost 11,000 UK and US students revealed that less than a quarter felt they had enough information to make informed decisions about studying overseas.By contrast, about 80 per cent of the students who were considering overseas study said they felt confident about doing so in foreign languages.And while UK students nominated the US as their preferred study destination – and vice-versa – seven of the top ten destinations for both groups were non English-speaking countries.The report, ‘Breaking through the barriers to overseas study’, was prepared by the British Council’s global research arm, Education Intelligence, in partnership with the UK National Union of Students and the US online student network Zinch.
