Monthly Archive for July, 2011

Marketing is Now Par for the Course

By David Matthews, Times Higher Education

University marketing departments should play a bigger part in deciding which courses are offered to students, a senior public relations expert has said.Peter Reader, director of marketing and communications at the University of Portsmouth, said marketing staff needed to make sure that there was demand for new programmes to avoid the creation of “vanity courses” by academics.

“If you are going to take a course to market that will be successful, you need to know there are (enough interested students),” he said.

As well as using data from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, Mr Reader said many universities now used focus groups to gauge the popularity of new courses.

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Announcing Plenary Speaker Ronald Barnett for 2012 World Universities Forum

We are pleased to welcome Ronald Barnett to the 2012 World Universities Forum as one of our plenary speakers.

Ronald Barnett is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at the Institute of Education, University of London. He is a recognized authority on the conceptual and theoretical understanding of the university and higher education. His books, several of which have won prizes and have been translated into other languages, include The Idea of Higher Education, Higher Education: A Critical Business, Realizing the University in an age of supercomplexity, Beyond All Reason: Living with Ideology in the University, and A Will to Learn: Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty (all published by McGraw-Hill/ Open University Press). His latest book is Being a University (Routledge – January 2011). Ronald Barnett has held senior positions at the Institute of Education, including that of Pro-Director for Longer Term Strategy and was also, for seven years, a Dean. He is a past Chair of the Society for Research into Higher Education, and has recently served as a Special Adviser to the House of Commons Select Committee Inquiry into Universities and Students. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Society for Research into Higher Education and is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and Visiting Professor at universities in China and Australia.  He also acts as a consultant, and has worked with most of the national organizations in the UK and many individual universities, including the University of the West Indies and the TATA University Institute of Social Sciences in India. He has been awarded a higher doctorate of the University of London, is an Academician of Social Sciences and was the recipient of the inaugural ‘Distinguished Researcher’ prize of the European Association for Institutional Research (EAIR).  He has been a keynote speaker in over 30 countries.

For more information about our plenary speakers, please visit our website.