All Ireland Society for Higher Education
| Name: | Peter Cullen |
|---|---|
| Email: | pcullen@hetac.ie |
| Institution: | Higher Education and Training Awards Council |
Donna Bell
Persons are the carriers of knowledge. Knowledge circulation promotes innovation and social development and is facilitated by improving mobility and national and international knowledge systems. Policy, standards and protocols are society's tools for regulating for robust systems. The first stage in establishing a robust international knowledge system is the facilitation of information exchange on higher education quality assurance, accreditation and the recognition of qualifications. The second stage is the agreement of standards in line with the principle of subsidiarity. Europe is at this stage.
International higher education is growing and shows signs of heading towards the same massification that transformed western higher education in the latter part of the twentith century. For example, in 2002 30% of higher education students in the US were foreign. Increasing internationalisation will favour competitive and dynamic providers.
The Lisbon Strategy is Europe's response to globalisation. It aims for Europe to be the world leader in terms of quality of its education and training systems that by 2010.
Policy responses to higher education internationalisation include for example at the the global level the work of UNESCO, the OECD/UNESCO Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross-border Higher Education; at regional level, the Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications Concerning Higher Education in the European Region, the Bologna Process, the Framework for qualifications of the European higher education area and Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area and the European Consortium for Accreditation; at the EU level, EUROPASS, the European Research Area, the European Research Council, European Charter for Researchers and Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers and the consultation document: 'Towards a European Qualifications Framework for Lifelongf Learning' and at the UKRI level the agreement on cross-referencing frameworks in Ireland and the United Kingdom.
The paper will (i) identify underlying trends driving globalisation and particularly the internationalisation of higer education; (ii) analyse the international higher education policy responses to globalisation especially those relating to quality, accreditation and the recognition of qualifications and speculate on future trends; (iii) evaluate the impact of internationalisation and those policy responses on academic, institutional and national autonomy and on maintaining diversity of provision and (iv) assess Irish policy on qualifications, quality assurance and accreditation to determine how it measures up to the opportunities and threats of globalisation.
References
1. Internationalisation and trade in higher education opportunities and challenges, ISBN 92-64-01504-3, OECD 2004
2. Stefanie Schwarz and Don F. Westerheijden (Eds.) Accreditation and Evaluation in the European Higher Education Area ISBN 1-4020-2796-6 Kluwer 2004
3. Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross-border Higher Education OECD/UNESCO 2005
4. The Economist 'A survey of higher education'. September 10 2005.
5. A Framework for Qualifications of the European Higher Education Area, Bologna Working Group on Qualifications Frameworks, Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation 2005.