What kind of digital user are you?
GÜTERSLOH (esna) -- One in five German students use all forms of digital media, a study shows. The main user groups are: those who primarily use the internet to transfer PDF files (one third), those using it to do exams online (a quarter) and the ones who use it for video learning (another quarter). Students’ preferences vary according to the discipline and learning styles at different universities ... read more 17.03.2016
Swedes prefer to keep to themselves
STOCKHOLM (uwn) -- Swedish universities do not recruit enough from abroad, a new report suggests. The large universities have a very high tendency towards recruiting their own PhD graduates, with just over 60 percent of professors having been recruited from holders of their own doctorates. One of the reasons for the low degree of international mobility appears to be that Swedish doctorate holders are comparatively older when graduating, having already established themselves with a family ... read more 18.03.2016
Official Dutch study guide misleads students
LEIDEN (ans) -- Not all student information channels are equally reliable. A independent report found that the study guide website studiekeuze123.nl, a joint partnership of the education ministry, student unions and higher education institutions, has been massaging its figures, including prospective graduate salaries. The report alleges that commercial interests have prevailed over objectivity ... read more 16.03.2016PhD boom in Spain
MADRID (el mundo) -- The number of PhD degrees in Spain is growing rapidly with some institutions processing up to six times the number of doctorates compared to the last academic year. Javier Ferri, economics professor at the Universidad de Valencia, argues that professors have an economic and career incentive to supervise doctoral students; a major motivation for students to aim at a high academic title is the gloomy employment situation ... read more 08.03.2016
Innovative funding system rejected in Sweden
STOCKHOLM (uwn) -- A detailed proposal for a more peer review based funding of Swedish research has been rejected by a majority of Swedish higher education institutions. One university official complained that the proposed system is “much too expensive and work demanding. Peer reviews are not fit for being transformed into numbers and weightings in a research funding distribution model” … read more 11.03.2016
Programmers under-appreciated in Montenegro
PODGORICA (vijesti) -- It is estimated that the European Union lacks 800,000 people in the field of information and communication technology, especially in relation to software. According to Goran Šuković, a professor at the Faculty of Sciences, Montenegro could be helping to solve this deficit, but degrees relating to programming are not gaining the necessary support from the government … read more 16.03.2016
Gender gap in STEM still needs bridging
WASHINGTON D.C. (chronicle) -- The first comprehensive global survey of science academies and gender has found that only twelve percent of the members of 69 national science academies are women – not more than six percent in maths and five percent in engineering. It recommends data collection and reporting on gender, and permanent structures to implement gender-mainstreaming activities ... read more 09.03.2016
13 Erasmus students killed in bus crash in Spain
BARCELONA (the star) -- 13 international students, mostly enrolled at universities in Barcelona, were killed in an accident while travelling in a bus to a festival in Valencia. Other 27 passengers were injured ... read more 20.03.2016
Underperforming colleges in Ireland lose out on cash
DUBLIN (her) -- A number of Irish third level colleges, including the Dundalk Institute of Technology and the National College of Art and Design, are set to lose up to a million euros in state funding after performing badly in assessment measures introduced by universities in conjunction with the Higher Education Authority (HEA) … read more 16.03.2016
Triumph of Artificial Intelligence
SEOUL (nature) -- The Chinese strategy board game Go has joined the growing lists of tasks at which computers are able to perform better than humans. In a 6-day tournament in Seoul, a reported 100 million people around the world tuned in to witness the defeat of Go professional Lee Sedol by the computer algorithm AlphaGo, created by the Google-owned company DeepMind … read more 15.03.2016
Turkey arrests academics on ‘terrorist propaganda’ charges
ISTANBUL (dna) -- Turkish authorities arrested three academics on charges of “terrorist propaganda” after they publicly read out a declaration reiterating a call to end security operations in the mainly Kurdish southeast. Turkish president Recep Erdoğan said the definition of a terrorist needed to be broadened to include supporters of terrorism, listing lawmakers, academics, journalists or civil society leaders as examples … read more 16.03.2016
Student union becomes an extension of EU Commission
AMSTERDAM (esna) -- The European Student Union (ESU), at their last conference, apparently failed to act on goals relating to student representation, to discuss student dissent and protest or to adopt initiatives to help students in trouble. Instead they complimented the EU on its agenda of modernisation, discussing “digitalisation, internationalisation and curriculum design” ... read more 12.03.2016
Late lectures stealing down time from students
VALLETTA (times of malta) -- Ever later lectures at universities in Malta are forcing pupils to abandon their extra-curricular activities or risk failing their courses. Students argue that it is becoming increasingly difficult to remain an active citizen without their work suffering … read more 12.03.2016
New employment law for researchers in Germany
BERLIN (haufe) -- Junior researchers and university lecturers in Germany have been granted more job security, thanks to a new employment law that came into force yesterday. Many more now will be given permanent contracts and those that are still temporary will be adapted to project running times and the career objectives of researchers ... read more 17.03.2016
Quality assurance in the European higher ed revamped
EU (equip) -- A new study provides an overview of the changes in the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area … read more 01.03.2016
Romania’s plagiarism problem persists
BUCHAREST (ps news) -- Further investigation into the Romanian plagiarism scandal has shown that both the rector and president of the University of Medicine and Pharmacy ‘Carol Davila’ in Bucharest were both found to have plagiarised in the past. Yet the sanctions against them were revoked in 2003. How can education minister Adrian Curaj hope to address plagiarism when it is so inherent in the education system? … read more 9.3.16
Croatia joins the austerity trend
ZAGREB (index) -- The Croatian education budget has declined by 160 million kuna (21 million euros) since last year, despite previous government promises to invest in the sector … read more 10.03.2016
Slow recovery of Italian student numbers
ROME (il fatto quotidiano) -- For the first time in years, the numbers of first-year students in Italy has grown. After a decrease of 20 percent in 2010, student numbers grew by 2.2 percent in 2015. However the country’s south is still losing young talent … read more 10.03.2016
Bosnian-Herzegovinian scientist honoured in the US
SARAJEVO (radio sarajevo) -- Ervin Sejdić, a Bosnian-Herzegovinian researcher of informatics and biomedicine now based in the US, has received the ‘Presidential Award for young Scientists and Researchers.’ He stated that growing up in the 1990s, surrounded by war, he could never have imagined becoming a scientist … read more 12.3
To Russia With Love
MOSCOW (sputnik) -- Russia is inviting 15,000 international students to study in Russia for free and for the first time has thrown open the doors to all students who want to study there. Russia offers highly-regarded courses in subjects such as engineering and philology and lower living costs than Europe ... read more 09.03.2016
Bulgaria hit by brain drain
SOFIA (btv novinite) -- There has been a catastrophic decline in the number of students applying to Bulgarian universities. This will have a considerable impact on the universities, with many of the best pupils from elite schools choosing to look abroad. An interview with one student who decided to move his study abroad blamed his decision on the old fashioned teaching methods, which still rely on out of date textbooks … read more 14.03.2016
Students occupying university building in Tbilisi
TBLISI (dfwatch) -- Protesters continue to occupy a building at Tbilisi State University, demanding a transparent process for electing the university’s management amid allegations of interference by the State Security Agency ... read more 11.03.2016
Student housing boom
VIENNA (standard) -- The student housing market is booming, especially for investors, who are profiting from the pressure on the general housing market. The most important markets in continental Europe are Germany and the Netherlands, followed by Austria. The construction of Austria’s biggest student housing development ―in central Vienna with 700 micro apartments― will start this summer ... read more 14.03.2016
Support for the Snowden of the science world
NEW YORK (nyt) -- The illegal leaking of millions of scientific research documents is still causing debate. Proponents of open access, including University of California, Berkley’s Michael Eisen, have come out in support of researcher Alexandra Elbakyan who in 2011 created a Pirate Bay-type site Sci-Hub for science papers, since gone viral ... read more 12.03.16
Russo-Belarussian cooperation in science
MINSK (belta) -- A Belarusian-Russian venture investment fund is expected to finance several science projects by the end of 2016. This is in addition to plans to create a Belarusian-Russian technopark, possibly involving the Belarusian State University and the University of Saint Petersburg ... read more 9.3.
No federal state universities in Germany
BERLIN (dradio) -- Education minister Johanna Wanka rejected calls to increase the influence of the federal government in universities and said no, there will be no Federal State University. However she praised the Excellence Initiative, an extra-budgetary scheme aimed at creating an Ivy League of German universities ... read more 05.03.2016
French students oppose new labour law
PARIS (le parisien) -- Student opposition to the French government’s proposed labour reforms continues. Despite talks with Prime Minister Manuel Valls with the student union UNEF, William Martinet, president of the union, is still not satisfied. He is demanding amendments to the new Labour Law because, “it is worsening our job security” ... read more 11.03.2016
New European university ranking
LONDON (the) -- The British weekly Times Higher Education has just released its latest rankings of European universities ... read more 10.03.2016