Monthly Archive for November, 2011

New Scoreboard for Research and Innovation

Published on November 29, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

By Geoff Maslen, University World News

Although research efforts by universities and private organisations are increasing across the globe, most research remains highly concentrated in a small number of US universities, according to a just-published OECD study that uses a new measure of research impact. Across disciplines, however, “a more diverse picture emerges”.

The report, Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2011: Innovation and growth in knowledge economies, uses what it says is a new indicator of research impact “measured by normalised citations to academic publications across all disciplines”.

Using this system, the report’s authors say 40 of the world top 50 research universities are located in America, with some excelling in a wide range of disciplines. “Stanford University features among the top 50 for all 16 subject areas, and 17 other US universities feature in the top 50 in at least 10 scientific fields,” the report states.

But it also notes that “a more diverse picture emerges on a subject-by-subject basis with the US accounting for less than 25 of the top 50 universities in social sciences”, a field in which the United Kingdom excels.

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Image:  Keattikorn

Higher Education in East Asia Must Improve

Published on November 26, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

By Yojana Sharma, University World News

University access has increased dramatically in low- and middle-income countries of East Asia, but higher education is “not yet fulfilling its potential”, according to the World Bank. The emerging economies and developing countries of Asia need to improve higher education to maintain economic growth and “climb the income ladder”, it said in a just-released report.

In the report Putting Higher Education to Work: Skills and research for growth in East Asia the World Bank says higher education is critical to increasing productivity and economic growth. Yet the number of graduates being produced by the region’s universities is still too low for the labour market in fast-developing countries like Cambodia, China, and Vietnam.

Higher education will be crucial for low-income countries to become middle-income and for middle-income countries to make the leap to rich country status.

The middle-income countries are China, Indonesia, Mongolia, the Philippines and Thailand, all of them with significant manufacturing capability. The low-income countries are Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, which have been experiencing rapid economic growth.

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Pearson and Google Jump Into Learning Management With a New, Free System

Published on November 22, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

By Josh Fischman, Chronicle of Higher Education

One of the world’s biggest education publishers has joined with one of the most dominant and iconic software companies on the planet to bring colleges a new—and free—learning-management system with the hopes of upending services that affect just about every instructor, student, and college in the country.

Today Pearson, the publishing and learning technology group, has teamed up with the software giant Google to launch OpenClass, a free LMS that combines standard course-management tools with advanced social networking and community-building, and an open architecture that allows instructors to import whatever material they want, from e-books to YouTube videos. The program will launch through Google Apps for Education, a very popular e-mail, calendar, and document-sharing service that has more than 1,000 higher-education customers, and it will be hosted by Pearson with the intent of freeing institutions from the burden of providing resources to run it. It enters a market that has been dominated by costly institution-anchored services like Blackboard, and open-source but labor-intensive systems like Moodle.

“Anytime Pearson and Google are used in the same sentence, it’s going to get people’s attention,” says Don Smithmier, chief executive and founder of Sophia, another community-based learning system that is backed by Capella Education, the corporation behind the online educator Capella University. “I believe the world will be shifting away from a classic LMS approach defined by the institution. Openness and social education is a very powerful idea.”

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College Diversity Nears Its Last Stand

Published on November 18, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Diversity, 1963: Vivian Malone, a civil rights pioneer, was one of the first blacks at the University of Alabama

By Adam Liptak, New York Times

Adam Liptak is the Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times.

Washington

ABIGAIL FISHER, a white student, says she was denied admission to the University of Texas because of her race. She sued in Federal District Court in Austin, causing Judge Sam Sparks to spend time trying to make sense of a 2003 Supreme Court decision allowing racial preferences in higher education. “I’ve read it till I’m blue in the face,” Judge Sparks said in an early hearing in Ms. Fisher’s lawsuit. But the meaning of the central concept in the decision — “this esoteric critical mass of diversity of students,” he called it — kept eluding him.

The 2003 Supreme Court decision he was trying to understand, Grutter v. Bollinger, had elevated the concept of “diversity” from human-resource department jargon to constitutional stature. The pursuit of diversity, a five-justice majority said, allows admissions personnel at public universities to do what the Constitution ordinarily forbids government officials to do — to sort people by race.

Judge Sparks in the end ruled that the Grutter decision meant that Texas was allowed to take account of Ms. Fisher’s race. Now her case is hurtling toward the Supreme Court. That could provide a fresh opportunity to consider what we mean when we talk about diversity. It could also mean the end of affirmative action at public universities.

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Photo: Bettmann/Corbis

How to Create a World-Class University

Published on November 14, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

Yojana Sharma, University World News

Although some of the world’s top-ranked institutions such as Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford are hundreds of years old, a series of case studies of successful world-class research universities, prepared by the World Bank, shows that a faster and more effective approach to achieving world-class status is to establish a new institution.

The just-released World Bank study, titled The Road to Academic Excellence: The making of world class research universities, found that new universities can grow into top quality research institutions within two or three decades when academic talent, financial resources and governance – particularly autonomy and academic freedom – are present from the start.

World Bank tertiary education coordinator Jamil Salmi, who co-authored the Ford Foundation-funded study with Philip Altbach of Boston University’s Center for International Higher Education, told a press conference in Washington on Thursday 6 October: “With proper leadership and vision, existing research universities can drastically improve the quality of their teaching and research.”

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Australia: Doors Open to Foreign Students

Published on November 10, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

Geoff Maslen, University World News

Australia’s 39 universities are preparing for a brand new day in 2012: not only will government quotas on the number of local students they enrol be lifted, but they will also be able to recruit as many foreigners as they wish as a result of a new fast-track visa system.

In an unexpectedly generous move that surprised even sceptical vice-chancellors, the federal government decided to lift most restrictions on the issuing of student visas to overseas students applying for a university place, opening the way for a likely flood of new applications from China, India, Pakistan and other Asian countries.

Universities that agree to meet certain requirements regarding the students they admit will also have access to a new streamlined system that will speed up visa processing.

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Image: Ventrilock

Universities Journal Associate Editors listing available

Published on November 8, 2011 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

universities_frontAs part of the process of publishing the Journal of the World Universities Forum all submissions are sent for peer review, prior to publication.

Assessment, comments and guidance by the referees are an essential part of the publication process and invaluable to the authors of the submitted papers.

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.

The Associate Editors  listing for Volume 4 of the Journal of the World Universities Forum is now available.


Sources of Illumination

Published on November 6, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Miri Rubin, Times Higher Education

As a historian of the Middle Ages, I am frequently asked about the links between universities then and now. Given the momentous changes that are affecting modern-day institutions of higher education and that touch the lives of so many people – students, parents, teachers, employers – such questions have become more frequent and more urgent, too.

All historians (especially those of us who focus on more ancient times) delight in pointing out parallels between “our” period and the present. An assessment of the role of medieval universities reveals some telling affinities between higher education then and now – and may hold lessons for today’s turbulent times.

When universities emerged between 1150 and 1200 in Italy, France and then England, they answered the needs of the two main institutions of governance – the Church on the one hand and dynastic kingdoms on the other. These institutions required bureaucrats: people trained in the procedures of government and in its lingua franca, Latin.

The standards of written Latin still depended on the conventions that had developed in the Greco-Roman world, encoded in the liberal arts of rhetoric, logic and grammar. The jobs for university graduates – bachelors of the arts – included the drafting of letters and diplomatic documents and the recording of important transactions, personal and public, ranging from marriage contracts to manorial accounts.

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Thanks, But No Thanks

Published on November 2, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Kevin Kiley, Inside Higher Ed

NEW ORLEANS — U.S. News & World Report is not going to change the way it composes its annual rankings of colleges and universities in a significant way anytime soon, regardless of how admissions counselors and higher education admissions officers feel about them.

That’s what the head of the rankings said here Friday at a session of the annual meeting of the National Association for College Admissions Counseling after a special committee from the association presented its final report examining the rankings. The report, which took about two years to compile, is largely based on a survey of NACAC members the committee conducted in 2010 and repeats much of what was established in a draft of the report released earlier this year. Officials from U.S. News worked closely with the committee throughout the process, a relationship that has bothered some rank-and-file members of the association. (The concern was that involving the rankings officials in the discussion might co-opt the process, although the final results suggest that the association did not hold back on its criticisms of the rankings.)

The committee’s report notes that while U.S. News’ rankings are undoubtedly influential, college admissions officials and high school counselors question their value to students applying to college. The report takes issue with the relevance of several components of the rankings — particularly the reputation survey (in which presidents evaluate similar institutions) and emphasis on incoming students’ class rank and standardized test scores — and the “distorting effects” they can have on both students and higher education institutions. It calls for U.S. News to remove test scores and class ranks as a component of the rankings, and to reduce the weight of the peer-assessment survey that currently counts for 22.5 percent of an institution’s score.

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