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ACA Newsletter nr 1430 January 2002
On January 15, the ACA Secretariat was joined by a new staff member, Alex von Balluseck. Alex is taking the seat that Brigitte Hasewend left empty when she started working for the European Commission´s Directorate General for research. Alex is being seconded to ACA by its member organisation Nuffic, where Alex worked as a senior consultant in the Department for international credential evaluation over the past four years. Alex has been working in the field of international cooperation in (higher) education for the last 12 years. He started at Nuffic, but soon left The Hague in 1990 to join the EC Tempus office in Brussels where he dealt with the selection of Tempus applications for individual mobility grants. Given his background - he studied Slavonic Languages (Russian) and Eastern European politics and economics - Alex was very interested to contribute to the further development of the Tempus programme when the countries of the former Soviet Union and Mongolia joined the programme. In 1993 he left Brussels for Moscow in order to establish the national information office for the Tempus programme in the Russian Federation. The main tasks of the office were providing information to (potential) applicants and to monitor the numerous running projects in the countries of the former Soviet Union and Mongolia. After almost two and a half years living and working in Moscow, Alex joined the European Training Foundation in Turin where he continued to work for the Tempus programme and where he was responsible for the network of the 11 national Tempus information offices in the Tacis countries and for the selection of applications concerning these countries. In 1997 Alex left Turin and went back to Nuffic where he took the position of senior consultant, mainly dealing with project acquisition, project (financial) management, monitoring and evaluation. Alex is looking very much forward to working with the colleagues at the ACA secretariat, and hoping to be able to make a useful contribution to the further development of the ACA network in the coming period.
In October 2001, the International COPERNICUS Conference on "Higher Education for Sustainability - Towards the World Summit on Sustainability Development", took place at the University of Lüneburg in Germany. The conference was jointly organised by the University of Lüneburg and the COPERNICUS Programme of the European University Association (EUA), and was sponsored by the Global Higher Education for Sustainability Partnership (GHESP), a grouping of COPERNICUS, the International Association of Universities (IAU), the Association of University Leaders for a Sustainable Future (ULSF) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Participants prepared and adopted on 10 October 2001 the Lüneburg Declaration. This document, addressed to the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Rio + 10), calls on higher education institutions, NGOs, governments, the United Nations and UNESCO to support and ensure that higher education, including research, is given priority in the international work programme to follow the World Summit. The GHEPS has invited the international higher education community to make use of the declaration in the preparation of the Summit, which will take place in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 26 August to 4 September 2002. To read the Lüneburg Declaration see
Following the events of 11 September 2001, a broad international debate is ongoing on visa security legislation and national student tracking systems in the United States. At the end of December 2001, the US Senate approved the White House's bill aimed at improving border security and visa screening and providing tighter monitoring of foreign students. Early January 2002, President Bush signed the defence appropriations bill, which contains $36.8 million to fund the development and start-up operations of the tracking system. Against this context, ACA associate member IIE (Institute of International Education), based in New York City, recently launched the Student Visa Policy Forum, an information resource on educational exchanges and students visas to help international education professionals keep track of and understand current developments in this area. The Forum is hosted on the IIE website and offers legislative resources, policy statements, and media coverage and invites you to join thematic discussions online relating to the effects of the September 11 events. More information at http://www.iienetwork.org/
At the end of last December, the ACA Secretariat received from the European Commission a draft text of a new Directive with the request to comment on the text. In order to have the opinion of all ACA Member Organisations reflected in its comments, the Secretariat distributed the draft text to the Member Organisations at the end of last year for comment. The Secretariat received a number of reactions with valuable comments. The ´philosophy´ expressed in the draft is that for a number of reasons (for instance the promotion of the EU as a centre of excellence for studies/training and for scientific and technological research), according to the European Commission, the objective of the proposal for a Directive should be to encourage the admission of third-country nationals for the purpose of study or vocational training. There are two ways of reaching this aim: - either by objectifying as much as possible the conditions of admission while preserving a certain assessment power to the Member States; - or by recognising some of the persons concerned a right to be admitted as far as they meet the requirements, knowing that this right could be limited in various ways (introducing an age limit, for instance) and that a provision could be introduced in order to make it possible for Member States to fix a maximum annual quota. At the same time it is considered important to guarantee the Member States the means to provide the needs of public security, public order or public health. Among other things, the advisability of introducing into the proposal a provision like the obligation for the educational and training establishments to inform systematically the competent authorities on the ´performance´ of the students concerned, in order to avoid that the admission for the purpose of studies is diverted of its object. The next step in the process of this draft Directive becoming more of a concrete proposal, will be a meeting organised by the European Commission on 11 February in Brussels at the Directorate-General Justice and Home affairs, during which ACA (and a number of other organisations / persons) will be given the opportunity to come forward with comments, suggestions or recommendations for alterations to the text. The Secretariat will keep you up-to-date on further developments with regard to this new Directive.
In November 2001, the European Student Convention took place in Brussels, under the Belgian Presidency of the European Union. The event, organised by ESIB (the National Unions of Students in Europe) and supported by the Flemish Ministry of Education and the European Commission (Socrates programme), convened more than 150 students from 37 European countries to discuss "the social dimension of the European Higher Education Area" (Bologna Process). ESIB has been promoting the inclusion of the social role of the university since the beginning of the Bologna Process, and successfully insisted that formulations to this effect found their way into the communiqué of the Prague follow-up conference last May. The Convention adopted the European Student Declaration, which underlines the need for a coherent social element of any higher education policy. It also insists that "students should be regarded as a core part of higher education, not as consumers that purchase a product". The Declaration can be downloaded at http://www.vvs.ac/ESC/
Following the success of its first research workshop (March 2000), the European Distance Education Network (EDEN) is organising the Second Research Workshop in the city of Hildesheim, Germany, from 21 to 23 March 2002. The workshop will address issues of research on Open and Distance Learning and eLearning, with a focus on policy and strategy issues. EDEN invites all those who do research, who need research, who want to do research and those who want to learn from others how to start research activities in ODL and online learning to join the workshop, and to submit papers. Any contributions should be sent (by e-mail) to the EDEN Secretariat by 1 February 2002. To register for the conference (before 28 February), please contact the EDEN Secretariat at eden@eden.bme.hu or check on the EDEN web site for further information http://www.eden.bme.hu
Call for proposals under EC/USA Cooperation Programme in Higher Education and Vocational Education and Training. Deadline for proposals is 1st April 2002. For more information, please see http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/ec-usa/usa.html#call Call for proposals under EC/Canada Cooperation Programme in Higher Education and Training. Deadline for proposals is 1st April 2002. For more information, please see http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/canada/canada.html#call Please note that the European Commission offices will be closed on 28 March, 29 March and 1 April 2002.
At the occasion of its 1st General Assembly, the European University Association (EUA) is organising a conference at the University of Roskilde/Denmark, on 19 and 20 April 2002. The conference will explore the relationship between university autonomy and the quality assurance and enhancement, in the context of the creation of a European Higher Education Area by 2010. Consisting of three keynote presentations and thematic working groups, the conference intends to provide a forum for discussion and debate on the current and future issues related to autonomy and quality assurance in a European and international context. One of the keynotes, on the theme of "Quality as a Tool of Autonomy", will be given by Professor Dirk van Damme, Secretary General of ACA member VLIR. The conference is open to EUA members, the Secretaries General of National Rectors' Conferences and invited observers. More information can be found on the conference website http://www.ruc.dk/eua
When Europe's ministers of education last convened in Prague in spring 2001 to review progress made since the adoption of the Bologna Declaration in 1999, they agreed to hold their next "monitoring meeting" in Berlin, in 2003. German ACA member DAAD now reports that it has been entrusted by the Ministry of Education and Research, in collaboration with the rectors' conference "Hochschulrektorenkonferenz", to prepare and organise this ministerial meeting. DAAD is responsible both for the logistics, and for the content of the conference programme. The meeting is to be held on 18 and 19 September 2003 in Berlin. The ACA Newsletter will keep you informed on further developments.
On the other side of the Atlantic, a trade proposal by U.S. officials is creating a dispute amongst the actors of higher education. The document submitted a year ago to the World Trade Organisation under the terms of the General Agreement on Trade in Services, calls for the removal of international trade barriers to higher education. Many traditional college leaders are fighting the proposal, which is seen as favouring for-profit-education providers, including distance-education institutions. Amongst the critics, the American Council on Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation that represent non-profit institutions, fear that such a treaty could drive a wedge between public and private institutions. Australia and New Zealand submitted higher education proposals similar to those in the U.S. document. While most European actors in the higher education area are opposing the inclusion of higher education services in the GATS negotiations and agreements, discussions over higher education concerns seem more and more inescapable. Full report of The Chronicle of Higher Education at http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i19/19a03301.htm U.S.Trade Proposal downloadable as Pdf format http://www.ustr.gov/sectors/services/educ.pdf
Brochure: Passport to Mobility - Learning differently, Learning
abroad Basic Indicators on the Incorporation of ICT into European Education
Systems - Facts and figures - 2000/01 Annual Report European Glossary on Education, Volume 3: Teaching Staff
5 - 6 February 2002 5 - 8 February 2002 12 - 15 February 2002 13 - 15 March 2002 21 - 23 March 2002 25 - 26 March 2002 11 - 12 April 2002 12 - 13 April 2002 19 - 20 April 2002 |
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