Learning outcomes and ways of thinking across contrasting disciplines and settings in higher education

This article describes the ways in which learning outcomes have been, or will be, investigated within the TLRP projects in higher education. It introduces the term ways of thinking and practising which has been used in one of the projects to describe the intentions of staff in higher education. This term covers what staff see as the essential nature of their discipline and so defines learning outcomes more broadly than is typical in the current specification of intended learning outcomes. The article considers the wide range of differences in learning outcomes that exist across higher education, reflecting different institutional missions and priorities, as well as the fundamental differences that exist between subject areas in the nature of learning outcomes, and considers some of the problems encountered in how to conceptualize and assess them.     

Affording the Unaffordable: Cost Sharing in Higher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa

The purpose of this article is to discuss some financial aspects of the future development of higher education in Africa entering the 21st century. Two main aspects can be distinguished: first, problems that concern the economy as a whole, the macroeconomic problems; second, questions that apply to the individual institutions of higher education. The former group includes questions such as: How much will the future expansions of higher education in Africa cost? How large is the capacity of African economies to finance this expansion and to what extent can tuition be applied? The article makes three recommendations to Africa's higher education: flexible tuition fees; a well-designed loan scheme; and a proactive measure to promote access and quality.     

SOME PROBLEMS OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN GERMANY

The underlying premise of this article is that the best way to become acquainted with higher education in Germany is to discuss its problems. Such problems as expanding enrollments, the role of research and teaching, the link between higher education and future employment, the question of the supposed equality of German universities, the link between regional development and higher education, and the question of the duration of studies are briefly discussed in light of the tension between the universities and the Fachhochschulen. The hint is made that the Fachhochschulen are more successful pedagogically than are the universities.     

Methodologies for problem solving: An engineering approach

Learning how to approach and solve problems which relate to real world situations is an integral part of the education of many higher and further education students and is particularly relevant to students studying for a professional or vocational degree. This paper outlines the nature of problems experienced by engineers and indicates how engineering students are taught to approach the identification and solution of the types of problems which they will experience as practicing professionals. Methodologies used are of general interest and may be applicable in other, unrelated, disciplines.     

对大众化高等教育质量观的认识

对目前高等教育界流行的主要的质量观进行分析和概括,认为,大众高等教育必然出现多样的高等教育质量观,否则高等教育只能停留在精英阶段而不能发展.而这些不同的质量观,都是在一定程度上、一个侧面反映人们对高等教育质量的认识,它们是辩证统一体.在高等教育大众化发展过程中,应以多样高等教育质量观为指导,建立多样化的评价系统,促进高校的多样化发展.并进一步指出,树立多样高等教育质量观,绝非不要关注当前高等教育存在的质量问题,高等教育质量始终是高等教育的生命线.     

PROBLEMS AND PRIORITIES OF RUSSIAN HIGHER EDUCATION

A wide‐ranging discussion of the problems facing Russian higher education in the period of transition is introduced. Although enrollment and employment levels in higher education continue to be high and have not suffered the sorts of cuts as in the other sectors of the Russian economy, much must be done to increase the efficiency of the system. For the author, the key to increased modernization and efficiency is increased reliance on the information technologies in all areas of teaching, learning, and research. She cites the case of World University in California that is completely an on line operation even while arguing that certain elements of traditional higher education should be retained in the Russian Federation. She is persuaded that both humanistic and scientific subjects and programmes can benefit from informatization. The result will be a world‐class higher education system for Russia.     

我国高等职业教育创新模式研究

当前社会经济飞速发展,我国普通高等教育已经走向大众化,而高等职业教育却没有得到长足发展,显得滞后。本文通过对高等职业教育的分析,对高等职业教育中存在的问题提出一些应对性的策略,力求为高等职业教育研究以及企业和学校实践操作提供理论参考。     

高职院校学业预警管理难题与对策

学分制是当前高职教育的主要学籍管理制度,既体现了职业教育的个性化特征,又体现了职业教育的公正公平性。但是,在它的实施过程中,会出现许多问题,本文就学业预警中的学分预警带来的一系列问题提出一些看法和对策。     

Improving lecturers' assessment practice in higher education: a problem-based approach

This article reports on a project based on the authors' concerns about assessment practice in higher education in the United Kingdom. These concerns stem from their experience as university lecturers, and from knowledge of research evidence and policy issues relating to assessment in higher education. Given the complex nature of higher education, improvement rather than mere change in assessment procedures will require the full participation of people who possess intimate day-to-day contextual knowledge, including an understanding of those aspects of the situation which are not easily measurable or even readily observable. The article details (a) a Popperian problem-based approach to action research designed to facilitate improvements in higher education assessment practice, and (b) how this methodology was adopted, tested and developed at the University of Sunderland. The authors’ aim is to encourage colleagues in other higher education institutions to adopt and further test this methodology in subsequent research.[1]     

Should we abolish the schooling of children?

In this same sectionProspects published in its previous issue (Autumn 1972) an extract of a working document presented at a conference held in Bellagio last May on education and development under the sponsorship of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.It is obvious that the article in question does not reflect, either in its spirit or its contents, the position of Unesco.Our purpose in publishing it was to stimulate a dialogue about such problems among our readers.The following constitutes a contribution to this dialogue, which we hope will be established in this section among educators and other people interested in educational problems.     

乡村教育的人文重建:起点与路径

我们目前关注乡村教育,首要的问题还是如何更深入地阐明乡村教育本身的问题,对乡村教育问题的简单归纳,可能导致真正的问题被遮蔽,隐而不现,这对于乡村教育的健康发展贻害无穷,试图立足于乡土社会作为现代教育的背景,由此来寻求乡村教育的人文路径,借以超越乡村教育问题的单面化.在面对乡土中国背景的同时,直面乡土缺席后当下个体发展的精神缺失与乡村教育人文重建的意义,重新审理乡村教育在整个现代教育中的位序.     

Strategy,Structure and Culture of the Hybrid University: Towards the University of the 21st Century

In many countries in the western world thegovernment is stepping back in the steering andfunding of higher education. As a consequence,institutes for higher education try to find additionalincomes on the market. Sometimes, this happens onlyfor financial reasons, sometimes as a result of adeliberate market-focused strategy. In this way,former publicly funded universities turn intoso-called hybrid organisations. The maincharacteristic of these hybrid organisations is thatthey try to combine the traditional task- and themodern market-steering. These hybrid universities haveto solve a number of problems in the field ofstrategy-making, internal organisation and thematching of different cultures. In this contributionnew concepts will be presented forstrategy-development and internal organisation of thehybrid university. The differences between thecultures of the traditional academia and the modernmarket are discussed and it is indicated how to bridgethe observed gap between these cultures. The hybriduniversity will be presented as the university conceptfor the 21st century.     

Changing balances in Dutch higher education

Like many other higher education systems in the Western world, Dutch higher education underwent profound changes during the last decade. In this article we will present an overview of these changes, and try to formulate an analytical framework that might be suited to analyze this process. In order to set the stage, we will begin with an overview of the Dutch higher education system, in which the broad structure is described, and some trends are presented. Next, an overview is given of the retrenchment and restructuring operations with which Dutch higher education was confronted during the last decade. Drawing, mainly, on public administration and political theory, we then attempt to formulate a framework for analysis. In this we focus on the Dutch higher education system as a policy network, and address the relationships that exist between the various key actors in the network: between government and higher education, among higher education institutions themselves, and among the different actors within the institutions, especially administrators and academics. In doing so, we hope to demonstrate that at all these levels some identical basic processes operate which to a large extent determine the outcomes of governmental policies aimed at changing the higher education system. Time and again the modern state stumbles over the academic system (Clark 1983: 137)     

2002年广西的高考改革——兼谈我国高校招生体制的若干问题

以广西2002年高考改革为背景,全面阐述一个既有统一性又有选择性、分层次高考初次尝试成功所遇到的困难,以及解决这些困难所采取的措施。并由此思考我国高校招生体制中的若干问题,提出高考应是统一性与选择性相结合的、层次分明的考试,考试科目的设置由高等学校提出,让考生自主选择考试科目;彻底放弃现行的投档模式,由考生直接通过网络向高校提出“注册申请”,并由高校确定是否同意其注册,各省级招办从中提供服务。     

THE UNIVERSITY OF TOMORROW AND ITS PLANNING

It can be expected that the dynamics of change acting upon education will require substantial modification of the objectives of higher education and its institutions.

Affected will be the teaching function as well as research activities. The main changes will most probably occur in the communities’ rôle in higher education. This also imposes changes in the role of managers and planners of higher education as well as new financial and legal problems which are thus created.

The article presented below discusses the extent to which planning in the universities, especially in relation‐to their facilities, shall be determined by the dynamics of the processes mentioned above. It is an extract from an article entitled “Planning the Facilities for the University of Tomorrow” which was written by Michel Woitrin from the Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain‐la‐Beuve, Belgium.     

Development of higher education and employment in the Federal Republic of Germany

In the Federal Republic of Germany — as in many other industrialized countries higher education has, under the influence of social, economic and political forces, developed from a relatively small, selective and elite-oriented to a large system of mass education. The increasing number of students and university teachers, and the expansion of scientific and technological methods and knowledge has brought about claims for genuine organizational transformations and for massive financial resources. This development has created a number of severe problems in the relationship of the respective socio-economic and political sub-systems; in particular, the relationship between higher education and the labour market has to be considered as a vital but unresolved problem.This article gives a short account of the quantitative development of the German universities and the labour market in the last two decades. It also describes the organizational transformations which followed the federal framework law on higher education (Hochschulrahmengesetz) of January 1976, and deals with some aspects of research in relation to such problems.     

The Rise of the For-Profit Sector in US Higher Education and the Brazilian Effect*

What accounts for the rapid growth in the For-Profit (FP) higher education sector in the US? How will its growth influence educational opportunity and degree attainment rates in a country that first pioneered a mass higher education built largely on expanding public colleges and universities? The current US experience is a version of what I call the ‘Brazilian Effect’: when public higher education cannot keep pace with growing public demand for access and programmes, governments often allow FP's to rush in and help fill the gap, becoming a much larger and sometimes dominant provider. This is the pattern in many developing economies such as Brazil, Korea, Poland and other parts of the world. Despite new federal regulations intended to better regulate For-Profits, my prediction is that they will continue to grow over the long-term in the US not so much because they meet societal demands for diverse forms of higher education, but because of the inability of the public sector to return to the levels of public subsidies they had in the past. The result now, and in the future, is a kind of policy default: the future tertiary market will not be the result of a well thought out policy at the national or state levels, but a quasi-free market consequence that will foster lower quality providers and fail to meet national goals for increasing the educational attainment level of Americans. This article discusses how higher education policymaking is about broad issues of socioeconomic mobility and economic competitiveness, but it is also about money, big business, and political influence.     

Benchmarking academic standards in the UK

Abstract

The Dealing Report in the UK supported the use of benchmarking in higher education, taking as its stimulus the use of benchmarking in industrial and commercial contexts. The UK Government's concern regarding academic standards has raised the question of whether benchmarking could be applied to them.

This article reports on a pilot study of the benchmarking of academic standards in the UK, and demonstrates ‐ with reference to empirical data ‐ that benchmarking in this context needs to be approached differently from benchmarking in industrial/commercial milieux, since it requires a combination of finely‐drawn comparisons and professional judgements if valid conclusions are to be drawn. It is argued that the complexity which underpins academic standards is inimical to the production of statements about standards that will be applicable across the span of a diverse national system of higher education. The argument presented can be applied, mutatis mutandis, to systems of higher education beyond the UK.     

The Implementation of Bachelor and Master Programmes in Hungary

Hungary's higher education system is being transformed fundamentally for a second time after the regime change in 1989–90. The first Higher Education Act was passed in 1993. An entirely new law issued in December 2005 involved fundamental changes in the entire higher education system. The most sweeping change was the introduction of the two‐cycle programme structure which, with a few exceptions, began in September 2006. National qualification requirements were replaced by education and outcome requirements, focusing on set competences defined for each study programme. This article provides a background, with facts and figures, of the Hungarian higher education system and an overview of the process and problems encountered that led up to the implementation of the Bachelor/Master structure. The reception of the system, based on interviews with various actors affected by higher education, reveals mixed responses, with respondents stressing the opportunity and their hope for a fundamental reform. The article also elaborates the goals and consequences of the ‘Bologna structure’. The traditional binary institutional structure of colleges and universities remains in place, but with both permitted to launch Bachelor and Master programmes. How colleges will be able to compete with more theoretically oriented universities in preparing for Master studies and, vice versa, how universities will be able to offer education at the Bachelor level that will be competitive in the job market remain to be seen. The final sections of the article deal with other aspects of the Bologna Process, such as ECTS, and the Diploma Supplement. One of the main concerns is that the quality of higher education, which was perceived to be at a high level in Hungary, even in the 15 years since mass education overtook what was previously an elite sector, should not deteriorate. The reciprocal effects of the new degrees and the job market are challenges Hungarian higher education will face a few years down the road.