A detailed review of the education sector in Australia as in the data provided by the 2006 edition of the OECD's annual publication, 'Education at a Glance' is presented. While the data has shown that in almost all OECD countries educational attainment levels are on the rise, with countries showing impressive gains in university qualifications, it also reveals that a large of share of young people still do not complete secondary school, which remains a baseline for successful entry into the labour market.

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Education at a Glance

This report examines the changes that have taken place since the 1998 UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education, in particular the main engines of change and their impact on higher education. This trend report is intended to provide background analysis and to animate discussion at the 2009 UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education. It examines the central issues and the contextual factors that have shaped higher education in the past decade, and presents prospects for the immediate future. Much of this report is concerned with the ways in which higher education has responded to the challenge of massification. Other issues examined include globalisation; inequalities in access; increasing student mobility; teaching, learning and curricula; quality assurance, accountability and qualifications frameworks; financing and the public good-private good debate; the growth of private higher education; the academic profession; the research environment; information and communications technology; and the impact of demographics and the economic crisis on the development and reform of higher education in the immediate future.

Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution: A Report Prepared for the UNESCO 2009 World Conference on Higher Education

The National Academy of Sciences founded The National Academies Press (NAP) with the goal of publishing reports of all four national academies. Annually, NAP publishes more than 200 books from the fields of science, engineering and medicine and offers more than 4000 titles in PDF on its website (http://www.nap.edu/) free of charge.

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The National Academies Press

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Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution

by J. Biggs and C. Tang, Maidenhead, England,
Open University Press, 2007, 360 pp., £29.99, ISBN-13: 978-0-335-22126-4

Teaching for quality learning at university

Internationalization has been one of the most powerful and pervasive forces at work within higher education around the world during the last two decades. With remarkably few exceptions, no corner of the globe or institutional type has proven itself immune to the call to “internationalize” in some fashion. In this process, practical applications and conceptual understandings of internationalization have evolved significantly, while the overall stakes in the internationalization game have become noticeably higher. Whereas at the beginning of the 21st century, international orientations, characteristics, and programmatic offerings of a college or university may have been perceived as merely an interesting and appealing component of an institution’s profile, today internationalization is a core issue of concern to the higher education enterprise, touching directly on questions of social and curricular relevance, institutional quality and prestige, national competitiveness, and innovation potential. More recently, for better or worse, institutions also view internationalization as a source of potential revenue. The authors of this chapter have previously asserted that it is “not possible for higher education to opt out of the global environment, since its effects are unavoidable” (Altbach, Reisberg, & Rumbley, 2009, p. 7). Yet, in spite of the powerful influence of the global context, “local realities of wealth, language, academic development, and other factors all affect the extent to which institutions are motivated and able to internationalize” (Altbach et al., 2009, p. 7). This means that leaders in higher education must be prepared to track and understand the broadest global trends in higher education, as well as the internationalization of higher education more specifically, while at the same time attending effectively to the unique needs and aspirations of their particular institutions, local communities, and regional or national contexts. Thus it can be quite challenging in today’s complex and fast-moving environments, which are often characterized by scarce resources and competing priorities, to mention just two common yet critical challenges. The good news is that senior international officers and administrators who are faced with the daunting task of making sense of this complex and shifting landscape have an increasing array of information and resources from which to draw insight and ideas. Internationalization and globalization have been the subject of much analysis over the last two decades. This work has resulted in a substantial body of literature exploring many 1

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Internationalization Within the Higher Education Context

A global revolution has been taking place in higher education during the past half-century that is at least as dramatic as the one that happened when the German research model fundamentally changed...

Laura E. Rumbley

Papers

Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution: A Report Prepared for the UNESCO 2009 World Conference on Higher Education

Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution

Internationalization Within the Higher Education Context

Tracking a Global Academic Revolution.

The Encyclopedia of International Higher Education Systems and Institutions