pp. 1-14

pp. 15-35

pp. 36-48

pp. 49-67

pp. 68-84

pp. 85-101

pp. 120-139

pp. 102-119

pp. 140-152

pp. 153-183

pp. 184-192

pp. 193-206

pp. 207-240

pp. 241-255

pp. 256-268

pp. 269-281

pp. 282-295

pp. 296-312

pp. 313-319

pp. 320-330

pp. 331-344

pp. 345-355

pp. 356-372

China is launching a nationwide investigation on the use of foreign textbooks at Chinese universities and colleges, following a previous government pledge to reject texts spreading “Western values” at the nation’s centres of higher education, writes Laura He for MarketWatch.Several universities in Beijing received notifications from the Ministry of Education requiring instructors to fill out investigation forms about the presence and use of “foreign textbooks in original languages” in class, the government-run Beijing Youth Daily reported recently.

A new report has found that despite the rapid growth of universities in the Arab world, the social sciences are only offered by 55% of them, reports Rasha Faek for Al-Fanar.“This might be due to the fact that most existing universities in the region are relatively young,” said Mohammed Bamyeh, a sociology professor at the University of Pittsburgh in the United States and the author of a new report Forms of Presence of the Social Sciences in the Arab Region. “After all, 97% of Arab universities – 491 out of 508 – were created after 1950,” said Bamyeh.

Just as casinos have proliferated across Macau in the past 15 years, so too have colleges. When the city returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1999, it was home to two universities and two tertiary institutions. Since then the total has more than doubled to 10. That's a lot of college places for a city of just 600,000 people. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the slack is being taken up by students from mainland China, writes Elaine Yau for the South China Morning Post.While undergraduate applications from China fell at several Hong Kong universities last year, the reverse was true in the former Portuguese enclave. The Macau University of Science and Technology, for example, received about 7,000 applications from China last year – a 30% increase from 2013. Now close to half of its 7,500 undergraduate students come from China.

The University of Tokyo and Kyoto University are scheduled to introduce recommendation-based admissions as well as so-called admission office (AO) exams based on interviews and essays for the first time this autumn. Taken ahead of the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry’s planned reform of college and university entrance examinations, the move by the two universities reflects a sense of crisis that they will not be able to survive amid international competition if they stick to conventional knowledge-based exams.

The state secretariat’s new higher education strategy reveals that the government is considering the introduction of a tuition fee for several popular university programmes, while other programmes, such as degrees in communication, would be abolished completely, reports Hungary Today. The Ministry of Human Resources had recently informed university and college deans of the plan, which includes the cancellation of several popular programmes, such as degrees in communication. Other courses – such as andragogy – would be available only to students prepared to pay a tuition fee. Other popular programmes will be available only at the National University of Public Service if the strategy, which foresees a 15% reduction in the total number of courses, is implemented. Changes are expected to take effect in September 2016 if the strategy is adopted. 

In the absence of quality higher education and with none of the Indian Institutes of Technology making it into the rankings of the world's top research institutions, Indian students spend US$6-7 billion (approximately Rs45,000 crore) annually in seeking greener pastures in foreign universities, writes Anuradha Himatsingka for The Economic Times. This was according to a joint study by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India and Tata Institute of Social Sciences on “Realigning Skilling Towards Make in India”, part of which noted: "Indians spend about $6-7 billion every year in sending their children abroad for higher education. Only a miniscule number of them choose to return home. It is not just the elite who spend generously on a good education and credentials; middle-class families also spend their life-time savings to educate their children abroad." 

A brief review of the major achievements Alessandro Volta, outstanding Italian scientist and physicist, in-ventor of a fundamentally new source of electrical energy, which played a decisive role in future studies of electric and magnetic phenomena. Provides information about the parents Volta, interesting facts from his life and work, including details of his self-education and pedagogical work. Given the facts of the history of the development of electrical engineering associated with contributions to this line of Benjamin Franklin, France Aepinus and Johan Wilcke. Describes the design features of the two instruments, Volta invented for electrical studies and discussions with Luigi Galvani. Volta was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society, in his honor erected a pantheon of other monuments in the city of Como, and named unit of voltage and potential difference – Volt.