Category: Worldwide PSE

African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA)

When it comes to higher education, Africa is in a dilemma.  On the one hand, there are enormous pressures to expand access to higher education, ever more so since most countries introduced Universal Secondary Education twenty years ago.  On the other hand, the resources available to satisfy this demand – either public or private – are extremely limited.  What gets sacrificed?   Too often, it is universities’ research missions, where the payout is both long-term and uncertain. But that is hardly

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Long-Term OECD Data on Institutional Financing

Just for fun, I went prowling through some back issues of OECD’s Education at a Glance (as one does), to look up how public financing of tertiary education has changed over time.  OECD specifically says you shouldn’t do this, which I see as an admission that they view the data submitted by national governments as either not particularly reliable or at least compiled by different people using different definitions/standards on an annual basis.   Having looked over the data, I can

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Oct. 6th, 2023)

Spotlight Good afternoon all, It’s great to see the 1,4k of you that opted-in to receive these AI-focused emails. If you know someone who’d like to receive them, please send them this link. We love to see the numbers growing. Quick update – We recently added a sub-section ‘Recommendations’ under ‘News & Research’ on our AI Observatory, where we gather recommendations on how to respond to GenAI from various types of organizations, including governments, coalitions of higher education institutions, interest-based

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Brazilian Higher Education

Hello. I’m Alex Usher and this is the World of Higher Education podcast. Brazil’s higher education system is a lot like the country itself. Big. Complicated. Riddled with inequality. And above all – still growing fast. In some ways it’s a fun-house mirror of the American system. It’s highly stratified, but the prestigious institutions for the most part are public and free rather than private and expensive. There’s a huge chunk of the system which is access-driven, but it is

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Sept. 29th, 2023)

Spotlight Good afternoon all, Thanks to those of you who joined us for our AI Roundtable on Pedagogy and curriculum last Tuesday, and for sharing your knowledge and experience in the chat.  It was interesting to learn more about the possibilities of GenAI in developing teaching and learning materials. From drafting learning objectives and lesson plans to building rubrics and drafting quizzes, there are clearly a lot of ways GenAI could support instructors. However, many questions remain, notably with respect

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