SCIENCE & EDUCATION

Many universities lack well-qualified teachers to ensure the quality of higher education, according to the Ministry of Education and Training's latest inspection. It has been revealed that 20 per cent of inspected universities failed to meet regulations on the number of teachers and their qualifications. In particular, seven universities had less than 50 official teachers each. HCM City's Van Hien University and Information Technology College exhibited the most serious violations by staffing only one teacher for up to 90 students. Meanwhile, the ministry's regulations state that each university needs to ensure one official teacher for 25 students.

Stakeholders in the Nigerian education sector have expressed displeasure at the decision of the National Universities Commission to suspend part-time programmes in Nigerian universities, writes Kuni Tyessi for Leadership.An estimated 10 million students, most of them workers, may be affected by the decision. In arriving at the decision, the commission argued that the accreditation of 30 courses in the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) would satisfy the needs of this category of Nigerian students, who see part-time studies as a way of improving themselves and enhancing their careers.

Teenagers from the most deprived backgrounds are lagging dramatically behind wealthy peers in the race for university places because of failure at school, according to major research published today.Academics warned that the gulf in entry rates between rich and poor students was driven by exam results at secondary school – and not discrimination from admissions tutors.Figures show that the highest-performing pupils from disadvantaged families lag around two-and-a-half years behind bright children brought up in wealthy homes by the age of 15.The achievement gap in England is around twice as wide as that seen in some other developed countries, it was revealed.

In a nod to the pivotal role women play in Africa, Ceibs business school in Shanghai has launched a programme that offers African women entrepreneurship and leadership skills.Participants must be business women who can write and speak good English. However, once they graduate from the programme, they will be required to mentor at least three fledgling, female entrepreneurs who would not normally be able to access a formal education.

China’s Guanghua School of Management of Peking University, Japan’s Hitotsubashi Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy and Korea’s Seoul National University’s College of Business Administration and Graduate School of Business cemented relations at the first BEST alliance symposium. At the event, the schools shared academic information and methods of research collaboration. Joint economic development research projects were also launched, exploring the economic changes which took during place last decade.

Naiku announced the release of Quick Question, a new feature within the Naiku assessment platform.Quick Question provides the ability for teachers to instantly ask ‘on-the-fly’ questions to their students, without the need to prepare an item or assessment in advance. Students can respond to Quick Questions - as they do with all Naiku questions - through virtually any web enabled device, including tablets and smartphones.

Author Jeanette Winterson is to become a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester.She will begin a two-year stint at the university's Centre for New Writing in October.The writer of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit will teach a post graduate MA workshop, MA seminar and lecture to undergraduates.She succeeds Colm Toibin, who completes his year-long tenure and Martin Amis who spent four years at the university.

The author of a report on international higher education has questioned whether UK universities can remain world leaders without more funding. The report for Universitas 21 rated the UK 10th best at providing higher education in a ranking of 48 countries. The study put the UK second for university research and teaching but 27th for spending on higher education.Universities UK said other more established global rankings regularly put the UK system second to top. Ross Williams, lead author of the Universitas 21 study, said the evidence showed the UK system was very efficient.

Higher education in the country is set to get a boost with the HRD ministry finalising plans worth Rs. 80,000 crore inorder to improve access to colleges and universities.The UPA government has embarked upon an ambitious plan to double the gross enrollment ratio (GER), from present around 17% to 30% by the year 2020. For this, there would be a need of several new universities and colleges across the country.HRD minister Kapil Sibal on Wednesday told Lok Sabha that 200 new universities and a degree college in each district of India will be opened in the next five years. “We have asked for Rs. 20,000 crore for opening new universities in the 12th plan,” he said.

The extent to which money does and should dictate the global exchange of college students was a touchy topic at a meeting of 16 nations held in conjunction with the G8 Summit.Most agree that studying abroad brings qualitative benefits for the students who go, the universities that receive them and the nations on both ends of the exchange. But it’s hard to monetize the value of increased mutual understanding, and considerably easier to calculate tuition and housing expenses.

Certificate programs can be added and updated more quickly than conventional academic ones. And they can help workers keep up with fast-changing fields such as information technology and intelligence, or get raises or promotions.But a main reason for the explosion in the number of professional certificates at traditional universities, administrators concede, is that they bring in revenue, largely from mid-career students who pay the full cost without needing institutional financial aid, or whose employers reimburse them for tuition

Oxford's Bodleian Libraries and the Vatican's Biblioteca Apostolica plan to digitise 1.5 million ancient texts to make them available online.The two libraries announced the four-year project after receiving a £2m award from the Polonsky Foundation.Dr Leonard Polonsky said his aim was to ensure researchers and the public have free access to historic and rare texts.Greek manuscripts, 15th Century printed books and Hebrew early printed books and manuscripts will be digitised

Malaysia is morphing into a key destination for foreign universities, with 25 applications received to set up campuses in the country. The latest applicants allowed to set up campuses are the United Kingdom’s University of Reading and Heriot-Watt University, reports New Straits Times.Interest in the tertiary education sector has shifted into a higher gear, said Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Mohd Khaled Nordin.

South Korean universities cut annual tuition fees by 4.5% on average this year, government data showed last week, caving in to domestic pressure to lighten the financial burden on students, reports Yonhap News Agency.An average tuition of 186 universities stands at 6.7 million won (about US$6,000), down 4.48% compared to last year, according to the data compiled by the education ministry. It is the first time that universities have dropped their tuition fees since 1948, when South Korea came into being after World War II, said Ko Young-hoon, a ministry official handling the issue.

The Ariel University Centre of Samaria now qualifies as a university, according to a report prepared by the Council for Higher Education in Judea and Samaria. But the bid to recognise the centre as a university has prompted hundreds of academics to urge Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar to revoke the process, writes Talila Nesher for Haaretz.

Indonesia’s Ministry of Education and Culture has made a bold but controversial decision to boost the number of research papers produced by the country by requiring all university students to publish papers in academic journals as a condition for graduation.Director General of Higher Education at the ministry Djoko Santoso told heads of higher education institutions that under a new regulation announced on 27 January, to come into effect from August, undergraduates must publish a paper in an academic journal in order to graduate.

A regional centre for space science and technology education for Western Asia will be sited at the Royal Jordanian Geographic Center (RJGC) by April, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs has announced.Awni Khasawneh, general director of the RJGC and secretary general of the Arab Union for Astronomy and Space Sciences (AUASS), made the announcement at the 10th Arab conference on astronomy and space held in Muscat, Oman, from 5-8 February under the theme “The role of astronomy and space sciences in the development of contemporary societies”.The conference was organised by the AUASS in cooperation with the Omani Astronomical Society.

The Obama administration puts its stamp Tuesday on a strategy to boost the nation's numbers of science and engineering graduates by working harder to retain those already in the college pipeline.Increasing the retention of students majoring in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to 50 percent, from current levels below 40 percent, would create three-fourths of the one million additional degrees in those disciplines, known as the STEM fields, that the administration sees as necessary over the next decade, a White House panel said in a report to President Obama.

Israel is the second country in the world with the highest education, though it ranked poorly in education expenditure and GDP, said a report released Wednesday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).The OECD's 2011 edition of the report "Education at a glance: OECD Indicators" showed that Israel has one of the highest percentage of the world's population with a post-secondary degree.