SHI JINGHUAN

Dr. Shi Jinghuan is a professor and the Executive Dean of the Institute of Education, Tsinghua University. She also works as the Chairperson of Beijing Association of Women Professors and is a member of the 10^th and 11^th Beijing Municipal Political Council.

Dr. Shi Jinghuan has worked as a professor, the Deputy Department Chair and the Director of Research Institute of Education and Cultural History in Beijing Normal University for quite a number of years. She worked as a Fulbright professor in the University of Maryland at College Park, US in 1996 and as a specially Appointed Professor at the Center for Research and Development of Higher Education at Hokkaido University in Japan in 2006. She currently serves as an oversea Auditor, Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA). She has broad academic publications in higher education, international and comparative education and history of education.

Dr. Shi Jinghuan has a rich experience in working with international organizations. She worked as the consultants for the projects of the World Bank, the UNDP, the UNESCO and the UNICEF.

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TAPIO VARIS

Professor of Professional Education, with particular reference to global learning environments at the University of Tampere, Finland, Research Centre for Vocational Education, and UNESCO Chair in global e-Learning with applications to multiple domains. Principal research associate of UNESCO-UNEVOC. Governing Board Member of UNESCO-IITE. Acting President of Global University System (GUS). Former Rector of the University for Peace in Costa Rica. Expert on media and digital literacy to the European Union. Communication and Media Scholar at the University of Helsinki and the University of Art and Design in Helsinki. and the University of Lapland, Finland, Published over 200 scientific contributions. Visiting Professor and Lecturer in many countries in Europe, North and South America, and other regions of the world.

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For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century.

Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work.

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It is a familiar lament: teaching excellence is doomed never to be rewarded as handsomely as research success - if at all. But some institutions are determined to tackle the pedagogical deficit. Rebecca Attwood reports.

We are proud of our reputation for teaching quality,” says David Mackintosh, deputy vice-chancellor of Kingston University.

“This is our primary focus as an education institution, so we are committed to recognising and rewarding excellent teaching, as well as research.”

But in doing so, he believes the university faces a challenge: finding fair and equitable criteria with which to assess top-quality teaching.

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American universities continued to lead the latest Academic Ranking of World Universities, but US dominance of the global top 100 list compiled by China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University slipped this year, to 54 institutions against 67 in 2009. Harvard clinched the top slot, as it has since the ranking was first published in 2003.

The University of California, Berkeley, leapfrogged Stanford into second place, while MIT pipped Cambridge into fourth place, leaving the UK university - one of only two non-US universities in the top 10 - in fifth place. Next came California Institute of Technology and Princeton, Columbia and Chicago. Oxford retained its 10th place for the fifth year in a row.

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From Simon Marginson and Philip Altbach, in Times Higher Education

Asian higher education is on the rise in a success story that is shaking up the global order. Simon Marginson explains the importance of the Confucian model to the region’s progress, while Philip Altbach discusses the systemic problems that could limit its advances

Confucian higher education is a new kind of system; an alternative global template. In some respects, the drivers of the Confucian model differ from higher education in mainland Western Europe, the UK and the US, where the modern university was incubated.

Statements about “the rise of Asia” are misleading. Asia is larger and more heterogeneous than Europe. In some nations, higher education is stagnant. In others, it is gaining ground. And the 40 per cent of Asia situated in the “Confucian zone” is moving into the stratosphere.

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“America is slowly coming out of the Recession of 2007 - only to find itself on a collision course with the future: not enough Americans are completing college… By 2018, we will need 22 million new workers with college degrees - but will fall short of that number by at least 3 million postsecondary degrees… At a times when every job is precious, this shortfall will mean lost economic opportunity for millions of American workers.” - Help Wanted, Executive Summary

The report presents a new approach that answers some critical questions about the emerging economy, including:

• When will the jobs come back?
• Where will the jobs be? Which states? Which industries? Which occupations?
• What postsecondary certificates and degrees will be required?
• Will the education system be able to keep up?
• How much will it cost to fund the postsecondary education America needs?

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In recognition of the important role of referees, the international advisory board acknowledges all referees who have refereed papers as an ‘Associate Editor’ in the volume of the journal they have contributed to.

If you would like to referee papers submitted to the Journal of the World Universities Forum, please email journals@ontheuniversity.com, with your professional details, areas of expertise and contact details. If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for papers within your expertise, we will contact you.

Common Ground is setting new standards of rigorous academic knowledge creation and scholarly publication.

Unlike other publishers, we’re not interested in the size of potential markets or competition from other books. We’re only interested in the intellectual quality of the work.

If your book is a brilliant contribution to a specialist area of knowledge that only serves a small intellectual community, we still want to publish it. If it is expansive and has a broad appeal, we want to publish it too, but only if it is of the highest intellectual quality.

We are accepting submissions for the 2011 volume of The Journal of the World Universities Forum.

The Journal of the World Universities Forum seek to explore the meaning and purpose of the academy in times of striking social transformation. The Journal brings together university administrators, teachers and researchers to discuss the prospects of the academy and to exemplify or imagine ways in which the university can take a leading and constructive role in the transformations of our times.

Today, universities face significant challenges to their traditional position in society—contemporary knowledge systems are becoming more distributed and learning ubiquitous. Where does this leave the university - as an historically specialised and privileged place for certain kinds of knowledge and learning, as an institutionally bounded space? What do these changes mean for the mission and structures of the renewed university? What are emerging as principal areas of the academic interest?

Refereeing of submitted papers will commence shortly so start the submission process early by submitting your proposal.

Paper submission guidelines and timelines are available online.

International comparisons of universities still have their detractors, but the appetite for them continues to grow. Phil Baty traces their roots and looks at how they are increasing in number and quality, while Ellen Hazelkorn considers their impact and value

Marginson believes that rankings are “changing history, not just in higher education, but in all the social, economic, cultural and governmental sectors affected by higher education. In other words, the ranking systems - and the single worldwide higher education sector they embody and create - will change almost every sphere of human activity.”

So, anyone who thinks that university rankings are a bit of fun - an inherently shallow service to student consumers good only for selling newspapers - may need to think again. It is not only students, parents and university marketing staff who are taking them seriously.

The rise of global rankings has transformed higher education for ever,” says Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at the University of Melbourne.

For Marginson, rankings are “creating one single worldwide research-university sector, which provides the basis for a one-world knowledge system and, ultimately, a single world culture - in which diversity will continue to abound, but held within one container”.

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Sarah Brookover, left, a senior at Rutgers University in New Jersey, with Vibiana Bowman Cvetkovic, a reference librarian.

From Trip Gabriel in the New York Times:

At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying fromWikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

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Anthony B.L. Cheung

Professor Anthony B. L. Cheung, GBS, JP is the President of The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Chair Professor of Public Administration, and Director of the Centre for Governance and Citizenship.

Professor Cheung received his PhD degree in Government from The London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. He has written extensively on privatization, civil service and public sector reforms, government and politics in Hong Kong and China, and Asian administrative reforms, having published 11 authored/edited books, 100 referred book chapters and journal articles, and presented over 150 conference papers and prestigious lectures/talks.

Professor Cheung is a Non-Official Member of the Executive Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and also sits on several statutory and advisory bodies including: the Consumer Council (as chairman), the Housing Authority (as chairman of the Subsidized Housing Committee), Hong Kong Mortgage Corporation (member of Board of Directors), and the Greater Pearl River Delta Business Council (as member).

Xu Xiaozhou

XU XIAOZHOU is Dean and Professor of College of Education, Zhejiang University. He holds the UNESCO Chair in Entrepreneurship Education at Zhejiang University. He is also Director of the Institute of Innovation Education and Entrepreneurship, the National Innovative Research Base of “Innovation Management and Sustainable Competitiveness.” He served as Senior Research Fellow at Institute of Eastern Asia Education, Korea in 2006. In 2008, he was bestowed title of honorary professor by the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on Comparative Education, Education Policy, Higher Education, and Educational Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education. In recent years, he as the editor-in-chief edits a range of influential series which cover “Entrepreneurship Education Research Series” (4 books, Zhejiang Education Press, 2010), “Education in China Series”(5 books in English, Zhejiang University Press & Homas & Sekey Books Press, 2009), “Education in China Since the past 60 Years” (4 books Zhejiang University Press. 2009) and “Changes in Higher Education Policy Series” (6 books, co-edited with Xu Hui, Zhejiang Education Press, 2007). His other important monographs include “Idea and Reality in Higher Education” (China Ocean University Press, 2009), ”Autonomy and Restriction: Comparative Studies on Policies of Universities” (Zhejiang Education Press, 2007), ”Excellence and Efficiency: Studies on Prior Development Strategies of University”(Zhejiang Education Press, 2007), “Modern Korean Higher Education”(Zhejiang University Press, 2007), “Educational innovation: Perspectives of internationalization” (co-edited with Roberto Giannatelli, Zhejiang Universtiy Press, 2006) and “Studies in the Recent Reforms of Higher Education Structure in the Europe and the United States” (Neimenggu University Press, 1997).

Please keep visiting http://www.UniversitiesForum.com for more updates and all of our conference news.

Congratulations to all of the Award finalists:

France is using governance reform and investment to push its universities up the league tables. Will it work? asks Paul Benneworth

In his new book A Chance for European Universities, Jo Ritzen, president of Maastricht University, sums up French institutions, along with those of Spain, Germany and Italy, as the mediocre face of the European academy. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, too, ticked off France for its sluggish higher education reforms in its Economic Survey of France 2009.

Even France is not immune to a preoccupation with its performance in international higher education league tables. And in the latest Times Higher Education World University Rankings, three of the four French institutions in the top 200 are not even universities, but grandes écoles, highly selective institutions that receive more than a quarter of science funding but educate less than one in 20 French graduates.

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We are pleased to announce the first of many plenary speakers for the 2011 World Universities Forum.

Dr S. Gopinathan is Professorial Fellow at the Policy & Leadership Studies (PLS), Curriculum, Teaching & Learning (CTL) at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. He served as the Dean of the School of Education (Mar 1994 till June 2000) and was the former Dean of Foundations Programme (July 2000 till June 2003) and Head, CRPP (May 2008 till Feb 2009). In this role he oversaw the development and implementation of the newly launched BA/BSc (Education) programme. He is a founder member of the Educational Research Association of Singapore and serves on the International Advisory Board of the Asia Pacific Journal of Education, and co-edits the Routledge Critical Studies in Asian Education.

To follow updates on plenary speakers or to visit the conference website, please click here.

Career advancement prospects in Indian universities became more difficult last week with the University Grants Commission adopting a performance-based points system. From now on, lecturers will be graded annually on their performance and will be eligible for promotions based on their teaching, research and publication quality - not on seniority.

This is a move away from the earlier seniority-based promotions most universities relied on. The commission’s plans met with stiff resistance by many unions in the last two years but have finally been accepted by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, with the agreement of almost all the lecturers’ representative bodies.

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The opinions of more than 13,000 academics will be used to build a picture of the standard of teaching and research in the world’s universities for the 2010 Times Higher Education World University Ranking.

Despite an increased sample size, the findings will account for 20% of final scores, compared with 40% under the methodology used from 2004 to 2009.

Meanwhile its main rival, QS, is introducing a rating system to better reflect the diversity of institutions by measuring their broader missions.

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