Expert Comment
Vice-Chancellor Nigel Thrift explores three possible future outcomes of online consortia delivering an online teaching presence.
What should the title of the leader of a university be? In some ways, it’s a trivial question. But in some ways not. The deeper you go into the issue, the more complicated it becomes as different academic cultures reveal themselves.
South Korean universities are pushing hard to make an even bigger impact in the world and, at least to judge by rankings, confidence levels and the state of their campuses, they are clearly succeeding. The South Korean higher-education system is in overdrive although it still has some problems, particularly a fall in tuition fee income, driven by electoral politics and a substantial demographic downturn which will have rapid impacts on the numbers of domestic students arriving at university.
The current furor regarding the validation of degrees at a distance by the University of Wales – a unitary institution accrediting degrees in the United Kingdom and abroad – is a sure sign that some form of regulation of higher-education quality standards is not only desirable but necessary. In particular, the problems at the University of Wales are likely to affect the international reputation of the blameless Welsh universities that are not part of the institution and this clearly cannot be right.
"Forgive the martial metaphor, but the English higher-education sector currently feels a bit like the British experience of the Second World War from September 1939 to May 1940. This was a period of relative but threatening calm before serious hostilities began, which came to be known here as “the phony war.""