HE News Brief 8.5.12
- US: Heavy hitters team up to offer free online courses
- Middle East: Spotlight on teaching quality
- Brazil: Affirmative action decision upheld by Supreme Court
Prestigious universities in the States are putting their weight behind free online courses. Harvard and MIT have announced a partnership called edX which will begin enrolment this fall. With 60 million dollars to commence the project, the universities will be offering five courses including classes in engineering and humanities. University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Stanford have also announced a partnership recently called Coursera, which will be offering free online courses. Both MIT and Stanford have already pioneered successful free online course offerings, with MITx enrolling 120,000 students and Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course signing up 160,00 students.
At a recent conference in Riyadh concerning ‘World-class teaching universities’, the general director for international affairs at the Saudi Ministry of Higher Education has highlighted a strategy to becoming a top teaching university. Salim Al Malik called for universities to evaluate teaching quality and to set up learning centres to train staff, as well as, to make teaching training a component of postgraduate studies. Universities, he said, are measured too heavily on research alone and that teaching should not be relegated in the pursuit of becoming a world-class institution.
Brazil has upheld sweeping affirmative action policies in higher education which allows a quota for enrolling students of African or indigenous descent. Now the country, which has more people of African descent than any other country outside Africa, is starting to tackle the economic and social divides that many are saying are linked to racial politics. Supporters of the bill say that they hope this policy will not only tackle social issues but help bridge the learning gap necessary for job creation.
HE News Brief 2.4.12
- Iraq: Institutions struggling to rebuild
- UAE: Institutions submitting data for 61 indicators for evaluation
- Chile: The imperatives of Classification
- UK: Institutions in the ‘middle’ set to see a 10% shortfall
HE News Brief 26.3.12
- Canada:Canada to receive 3,000 Brazilian students
- UK: Government injection for research and development
- Middle East: Comparative data for MENA required
- Vietnam: Lawmakers to vote on autonomy for universities
HE News Brief 30.1.12
by Abby Chau
- SOUTH KOREA: A third of universities have announced the intention of dropping tuition fees by at least 5%
- SAUDI ARABIA: The government has announced that it hopes to have 50,000 graduates from the world’s top 500 universities by 2020
- UK: Application rates projected to fall by 10% for the autumn 2012 term amidst tuition fee hikes and budget cuts
- GERMANY: A different take on foreign students?
Classifying higher education institutions in the MENA region
By John O’Leary, executive member of the QS Global Academic Advisory Board
Universities in seven Arab countries have been classified as part of an international project that is intended to lead to a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of higher education across the Middle East and North Africa.
The Institute of International Education (IIE) and the Lebanese Association for Educational Studies launched their findings at last month’s World Innovation Summit on Education, in Qatar.
Research for the classification was carried out at the height of the Arab Spring, which restricted its scope. Egypt would have been the largest higher education system to be surveyed, but the researchers eventually settled for a classification of universities in Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates.
The draft report stressed the rapid development of higher education in the seven countries, where the number of students grew from 2.9 million in 1998-9 to 7.6 million in 2007-8. The number of universities had grown from 174 to 467 in a decade, supplemented by countless other higher education institutions, many of them privately owned. Dr Rajika Bhandari, deputy vice president of research and evaluation at the IIE, outlined some of the challenges. “It was difficult to get education ministries to cooperate, even before recent political events in the region,” she said. “There needs to be more complete data before we can say this is reliable and valid.” However, the research underlines the diversity of higher education provision in the region.
Universities are classified according to 11 different dimensions, from the student and faculty profiles to their cultural and religious orientation, and regional and international engagement. The report suggests growing use of English throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In the countries surveyed, 23 per cent of universities were using the language for administration, 36 per cent to teach the humanities and nearly 47 per cent to teach the sciences.
This trend reflects an increasingly international outlook. Some 35 per cent of universities had international offices, although 42 per cent were considered to have no or only a low level of international engagement.
The authors do not claim that their research is yet representative of the region as a whole. In particular, they found it difficult to extract complete data from private institutions, many of which were relatively new. Classifying Higher Educations in the Middle East and North Africa: a Pilot Study is available on the IIE website. A full report is also available.
Public spending and university quality: is there a link?
by Martin Juno
Broadly speaking, higher education systems range from those relaying almost entirely on public funding to those mainly supported by private sources. Of course, there are a variety of options between those extreme points and most countries try mixed schemes.
Which system provides the better outcomes in terms of university teaching and research quality?
An interesting exercise that may provide a general answer to this question is to compare the relative performance of institutions operating in different funding environments. In order to conduct this analysis we used the higher education finance indicators provided by UNESCO (available here) , establishing four range groups (or quartiles) of public spending on tertiary education as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the countries . Then the top 400 QS World University Rankings (QSWUR) institutions – available on topuniversities.com- were distributed among each spending level quartile and the average scores for every group were calculated.
Continue Reading
HE News Brief 21.11.11
by Abby Chau
- AUSTRALIA: Internalisation activities are entering a third stage
- MIDDLE EAST: Foreign branches in Qatar and Dubai are faring well
- INTERNATIONAL: A new Autonomy Scorecard produced by the EUA
- CHILE: Students are going to the table after six-months of protests Continue Reading
HE News Brief 25.10.11
by Abby Chau
- CHILE: Student protests have erupted in Santiago
- CHINA: Collaboration of 11 institutions to form the Beijing Tech
- INTERNATIONAL: A new report by the World Bank follows 11-leading universities
- UK: A BBC investigation into graduate employability
- NETHERLANDS: Call on cap for foreign student numbers Continue Reading
HE News Briefs 27.9.11
by Abby Chau
- AUSTRALIA: Visa restrictions have been lifted for international students
- UNITED STATES: Admission officers feel pressure to look at students who can pay their own way
- SAUDI ARABIA: The country has been building partnerships around the world but some warn caution
- SPAIN: Finding it difficult to implement its second year plan for the Bologna Process
- BRITAIN: Tuition fee hikes have made some consider other routes for students Continue Reading
Middle Eastern universities begin to make their mark
by Martin Ince
They may be at an early stage in their development, but investment schemes of Middle Eastern nations are beginning to pay dividends.
Across the Middle East, nations large and small are developing plans for higher education. Some have immeasurable sums of oil wealth to spend on this ambition, but even those that lack billions of petrodollars see no reason to be left behind.
Some Middle Eastern nations want universities for the new knowledge they generate, with an eye on replacing oil money with high technology employment. But others are aware of the soft power potential of universities in the struggle for world prominence. They would like universities that are good enough for their elites not to assume that their children have to go to Harvard or Oxford to complete their education. Continue Reading
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