1. Judith S. EATON
President, Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), USA
Rapporteur
Parallel Working Group B
What Services are needed for Member Institutions?
IAU International Conference
Alexandria, Egypt
15-16 November 2005
Seven major points emerged from the Working Group B discussions.
These were:
1. The international conversation about cross border higher education (CBHE) and
capacity building is in its early stages for many. For others, the conversation is
just getting started. CBHE may or may not have touched an institution.
2. There is a great deal of unevenness of experience with CBHE in institutions and
countries with regard to how traditional institutions themselves address CBHE
and how institutions deal with emerging new providers of higher education, e.g.,
distance learning providers and private for-profit higher education.
3. There are a number of key actors in CBHE: IAU, national organizations, regional
associations, multi-national organizations, institutions, students, companies, and
governments. All have an opportunity to contribute and all have responsibilities.
4. Addressing CBHE is about our working together and a primary emphasis on
cooperation among actors. It is a bottom up activity and not the work of a single
body.
5. Our responses to "what services are needed" clustered around two of the six
desired outcomes laid out by Karen McBride of AUCC: the outcome of achieving
a strong quality culture for institutions and the outcome of achieving best
practices in institutional CBHE activity.
6. We identified some services that might be desirable, for example
a. Services for student mobility,
b. Services for institutional operation: networking, information-sharing,
research, ICT, addressing brain drain
c. Services to address quality: building quality culture, enhancing quality,
and affirming threshold quality.
We need an ongoing dialogue about the core academic values, e.g., academic freedom
and institutional autonomy, and how they inform our decisions about CBHE.
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2. 7. The group pointed out that underlying our effort with CBHE is the need to pay
attention to differences between traditional research universities and other types
of institutions, both traditional institutions that are not research-based and
emerging providers (e.g., commercial, distance learning, private/for-profit). An
ongoing dialogue about academic values in the changing context of CBHE is
needed.
In summary:
The group addressed the question of needed member services in relation to CBHE. We
reminded ourselves of the complexity of addressing CBHE – that it involves many
actors. We offered a number of suggestions for services around two of the desired
outcomes of achieving institutional quality culture and developing best practices.
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