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Encyclopedia Britannica Empowers Students in the Middle East

Amanda Bragg — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 12:30:25 +0000

Five schools in Bahrain will receive training and resources from Encyclopedia Britannica Online to increase knowledge of the internet. This follows the trend of 112 schools throughout the Middle East receiving consultancies and educational resources from the company. Groups such as SABIS, GEMS, and Manarat education systems have already been aided.

Access to Britannica Online will allow students to complete research in the classroom as well as at home. Studies have shown that once trainings have occurred, the schools are more likely to continue to use the technology. Higher education is the next focus with the company believing them to be the most in need.

“Through access to Britannica Online, we hope that students in Bahrain can be confident that the material they are accessing not only provides them with the most accurate information available but also encourages them to think about and question the topic they are researching,” said a spokeswoman for the company.

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Making Facebook Work for Language Schools: A Language Testing App

Ling Shu — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 05:25:49 +0000

Language Room, a technology company founded by Will Leader, has invented a new English language testing App for Facebook called Test Your English. Companies can install the App on their Facebook pages, and visitors will be able to test their language skills right on the page. Hopefully, this will allow education organizations to reach a larger audience of potential students – for a price. Sadly, the App is not free.

Once a test taker completes the exam, the score will be posted to his or her timeline (where they then have the option of deleting it). Finishing the test also guarantees the App an automatic “like.” A sound marketing strategy move – the more likes, the more timeline posts, the larger the audience grows.

The App is also completely customizable (language, questions, answers, design, branding – you name it, you can change it). It can also be programmed to self-score.

Downside? The speaking portion of the exam has to be done with a real person so any test takers will have to directly call the organization offering the test.

Will Leader said, “Every agency and school I met at trade fairs had a Facebook page but could not measure how many students they recruited from Facebook. We developed a simple-to-use Facebook App that works for every agent and school.”

Creative Commons Love: Seth Miller on Flickr.com

Philippines May Be Asia’s Next Education Hub

Amanda Bragg — Thu, 31 May 2012 18:30:42 +0000

With a growing investment in education and a high proficiency in English, the Philippines may be the next hub for education in Asia. Growth is high in the country, meaning that investments from the country and abroad hope to have a way into the sector.

Other Asian countries will begin sending students to learn English if investments go well, replacing Australia and Singapore. With other investments comes the hope that students will become more efficient and able to enter the workforce after graduation.

“What we propose is to cut out the middlemen. The corporations tell us what they want from our students, and we train them according to those guidelines. That way they are better prepared for those jobs when they graduate,” said the creator of a new college called the South Forbes City Colleges (SFCC).

Undergraduate courses in Business Administration, Tourism Management, and Hotel Management will be offered at SFCC during its first few years.

Creative Commons Love: World Bank Philippines on Flickr.com

Young Adult Author Examines 900 Books, Finds Racial Representation Lacking

Susie Hufford — Thu, 31 May 2012 15:01:27 +0000

Young Adult (YA) author Kate Hart did some unofficial research on the covers of YA books published in the US in 2011. She looked at around 900 books and found that 90% of the covers featured white characters, ten percent featured racially ambiguous characters, and other ethnic backgrounds were featured in less than two percent of covers. She explains that the percentages do not add up to 100 because many covers featured multiple characters.

She broke down those statistics further by explaining that even with covers featuring non-white characters, most were not facing viewers and they were often in the background. If they were prominently placed, they were often surrounded by white friends.

Hart says her research was not meant to place blame on any particular aspect of the publishing industry but rather to call attention to representation in the YA genre and to create discussion. She also added a disclaimer saying that her work was not professionally researched.

Although Hart’s research may have just been a personal project, her findings call attention to needed variation of representation in the YA genre.

Creative Commons Love: Blue Train Books on Flickr.com

To Argentina! An Influx of International Students

Ling Shu — Thu, 31 May 2012 13:05:28 +0000

Universidad de Buenos Aires

Since 2007, the international student population at the Universidad de Buenos Aires(UBA) has increased by an impressive 45%. In 2009, the population numbered approximately 6,700. The reason for the influx of non-Argentinians? Prestige —The UBA is one of the top ten ranked universities in Latin America, right behind universities in Brazil, Chile, and Mexico.

Not only is the UBA a renowned educational institute, it also happens to be a cheaper option, especially for students coming from Colombia, whose public schools are much more expensive.

But it’s not just the UBA that’s experiencing this international population boom. The Universidad Argentina de la Empresa’s Colombian population has grown 45% since 2009. The Universidad de Palermo boasts that 30% of their student population is international, about 3,500 to 4,000 students and increasing (by two percent already this year!).

Most of the international students in Argentina hail from other Latin American nations.

Gabriel Foglia, the Faculty of Science and Economics Dean at the Universidad de Palermo, attributes her university’s popularity to its students – the true judges of a good school: “The university has communication strategies in specific countries, they organize talks and publicity campaigns, but our main source is word of mouth from students who recommend their experience.”

Creative Commons Love: Hanneorla Hanneorla on Flickr.com

Where To Build the Schools? Geographic Information Systems Can Help

Tiffany Tsai — Thu, 31 May 2012 04:50:22 +0000

After securing funding, an educational district’s most important task is deciding where to allocate those funds. A province in South Africa is now adopting Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a multi-dimensional mapping technology, to answer the incessant questions of who needs the most help, which benefits matter, and where the greatest difference can be made.

The Western Cape Education Department released its three-year education master plan in 2010, heralding the construction of 45 schools throughout the province. Some are to be new structures while others are revisions of incorrectly built structures. The educational infrastructure will be updated through both consolidation and expansion of various schools, IT Web reports. But the reshaping is no small project. With aims of increasing learner capacity by 30,000 and becoming the green energy powerhouse of South Africa, the Western Cape has to funnel its resources carefully.

Enter GIS. One of the most versatile software toolkits on the market, GIS has applications in everything from homeless animal welfare to environmental health. Layers of information that can be toggled on and off allow the user to discover correlations between distinct sets of data. With the help of the technology, Western Cape planning officials have been able to compare such factors as the size of school facilities, school fees, mediums of instruction, poverty index data, and more, all on an intuitive visual interface (a.k.a. a map). Sometimes, it just takes the right tool to do the job.

Creative Commons Love: The City Project on Flickr.com

Employment Rates of Recent Grads in Japan Lowest on Record

Susie Hufford — Wed, 30 May 2012 18:05:21 +0000

: Students Studying at Nihon University

In Japan this year, roughly one-third of graduating job seekers were unable to find a job. A lucky 68.8% secured one before graduation. This is the lowest percentage of employed graduates since 1996, when the statistics were first collected.

Suicide rates in graduates who can’t find an occupation are skyrocketing: there has been a 250% increase since 2007 for those in their late teens and early twenties.

Students who don’t receive jobs can often see their lives as a slippery slope. Once graduates in Japan get a higher-paying job, they generally stay there as jobs in Japan are long-term, sometimes lifelong, engagements. This would be an ideal situation for many graduates, but companies are leery of hiring them, often because they already have too many long-term employees.

Creative Commons Love: Danny Choo on Flickr.com

Education Report Has Stunning News for Pakistan

Amanda Bragg — Wed, 30 May 2012 15:20:18 +0000

The South Asia Forum for Education Development has released the Annual Status of Education Report Pakistan for 2011, which revealed startling information; Pakistan is the second highest country in the world for school dropouts. More than sixty-five percent of mothers were found to be illiterate, and in rural areas, 57.3% of children between the ages of three and five were not enrolled in school.

Women are the most underrepresented in Pakistani education with 50.2% of dropouts being girls. Only 34.9% of the 70.6% of children enrolled in schools are girls. Food based incentives in rural areas have been suggested in the hopes that this will alleviate some concern of the poorest families.

Other options include creating separate facilities for girls (who are less likely to be sent to school due to cultural boundaries). Water and sanitation for rural areas would attract more students as well.

Creative Commons Love: EFA Report on Flickr.com

A Women’s Education Revolution in Morocco

Ling Shu — Wed, 30 May 2012 12:15:06 +0000

In 2007, the Moroccan government began implementing a national literary program targeting rural girls and women. The program’s beneficiaries, which number nearly 20,000, each receive a total of 300 hours of lessons in basic reading, writing, and math skills. They also learn about civil rights, the environment, development, social studies, and acquire technical skills such as weaving, baking, and beekeeping.

One of the program’s main objectives is development, both in a social and economic sense. The program also includes post-literacy training, which will train women how to use their new-found skills to run micro-projects. Hopefully, the program can help lift women out of illiteracy and poverty.

El Habib Nadir, director of the literacy department in the ministry of education, said, “The trend has been to shift from standard literacy, in which programs were limited to teaching students the basics of reading, writing, and computing, to a literacy of social integration of beneficiaries in their environment. The target is one million beneficiaries per year and to reduce Morocco’s illiteracy rate to 20% by 2016.”

The program’s grants cover course fees, teacher-training, and learning tools like pens and books.

For more information on the program, please click here.

Creative Commons Love: trevorappleton on Flickr.com

Asian Universities’ Publication Rates Soar

Tiffany Tsai — Wed, 30 May 2012 06:07:02 +0000

Twenty years ago, if you searched the annals of prestigious scientific journals like Nature and Science, almost all of the results would have been from institutions in America, Europe, or Australia. In 1995, only 38 countries were producing 1,000 or more scientific papers a year. Asia was barely on the radar for research and development (R&D).

The list of highly publishing countries had increased to 48 by 2009. Today, China claims approximately 10% of the world’s scientific publications and invests more money in R&D than any other nation except the United States. The landscape for global science is seeing tectonic shifts, as Professor Simon Marginson made clear in his speech at the 10th Annual Higher Education Summit in Melbourne last week.

“When the largest nation in the world grows its research at rates that have never been seen anywhere before, this is a game changer,” Marginson said. Marginson also compiled a list of universities with over 5,000 internationally ranked papers, observing, “There were 64 U.S. universities on the list, six from Australia, and only 12 from the whole of [Asia]. But as cite rates improve there will be many more Asian universities on that list in future.”

As of now, citation rates are the only major check on the Asian universities’ progress. While the quantity of articles from these countries has skyrocketed, the number of citations has followed at a more sluggish pace. Since scientific papers only have impact if they are read and incorporated by other scientists, this means the “rise of the Asian giants” is remarkable for its sheer volume of output rather than quality on a per-article basis. However, Marginson also touched on a notable exception: the National University of Singapore tops the Australian National University, often considered Australia’s best, in both number and impact of publications.

Creative Commons Love: DennisSylvesterHurd and SSteacher on Flickr.com