Category: Europe

Improve digital experience for all by focusing on international students

“Broadly, international students have a greater variety of attitudes and a greater variance of digital skills than their UK counterparts”

International students coming to the UK are an increasingly diverse group. They arrive with a breadth of personal perceptions, cultural backgrounds and prior experiences both inside and outside formal education. These experiences impact on how well they use digital technologies to learn.

This diversity means that the digital experience of international students coming to the UK is inconsistent with all their needs.

The problems these students face can be tackled by higher education providers taking a more inclusive approach, focusing on equity and outcomes. They can create a digital experience that benefits all students, not just international students.

The Jisc team has embarked on a four-phase research project aimed at understanding the digital experience of international students studying in the UK. Our findings and initial recommendations from the first phase will be published in the middle of April 2023.

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How should universities respond to robot writing?

“At one end of the spectrum are ‘the accommodators’ who see the inevitable rise of AI and conclude that fighting it is pointless. But this is a false dichotomy”

The arrival of automated essay-writing software has sent shockwaves through the global higher education sector. Academics and administrators are urgently debating how to respond to a technology that could make cheating a run-of-the-mill, free, and potentially acceptable behaviour for millions of university students.

Just last year Australia’s higher education regulator, TEQSA, was busy blocking access to scores of essay mills – websites that offer to write essays for students – usually for a few hundred dollars, with turnaround times of 24 hours to two weeks. That response now feels like it came from a bygone era, in the face of the game-changing ChatGPT, the new AI algorithm that can respond to nearly any prompt by spitting out original text right before one’s eyes.

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Interdisciplinary collaboration for 21st century learning

“Within the busy, everyday lives of teachers, is it practical to overhaul the system while protecting the sanctity of their subject?”

Regardless of which level of education they work in, every teacher will have some form of specialism; be it early years, secondary mathematics, art or music. However, in an increasingly globalised and interconnected world, educators are waking up to the need for a new style of learning that is more transdisciplinary and focused on the skills and competencies needed for the 21st century workplace.

The traditional approach of narrow subject specialisms is obsolete, according to Reimers (2009), and teams of teachers from across the disciplines need to work together to create a more integrated, globally-minded approach to learning.

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UK to introduce tougher immigration rules for students and dependents?

“The proposed policy seems out of the blue, as it goes against everything the government has said in the past decade”

British home secretary Suella Braverman is drawing up new immigration rules to make it harder for foreign students to come to the UK with their dependents. This proposal has come in light of a five-fold growth in “dependant visas” issued in the last three years.

If approved, it will be added to other post-Brexit measures implemented since the UK left the European Union. But how will a changed immigration system impact student migration and how will education exports economy be impacted?

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UK quality on the global stage

“While interest in UK higher education remains strong, the move away from international quality standards in English regulation poses significant risks”

Though it may not come to mind as an export in quite the same way as cars, oil or whisky, education contributes significantly to the UK’s international trade economy with higher education contributing 70% of the country’s total education revenue in 2019. The global reach of higher education yields numerous additional benefits including staff and student mobility, research collaboration and knowledge exchange. The UK Government’s latest international education strategy sets an ambitious target to increase the value of education exports to £35 billion per year by 2030. The UK’s ability to meet this target will rely heavily on the global confidence currently enjoyed by UK higher education.

Reputation is not built overnight and the significant trust placed in the quality of UK higher education has been the result of a concerted effort by the sector over many decades, supported by a shared vision of what high-quality teaching and learning looks like.

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Designing for a rapidly changing world

“To develop the education paradigm, we should look more to our physical environments”

Some 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist. Designing learning environments for an unknown future call for flexibility, says learning space creator Rosan Bosch.

The lifespan of knowledge and skills acquired in school continues to shrink. Science and technology evolve in a pace that constantly push our global work force to become more adaptable and agile, and despite of this fact schools still have the same layout that was developed for rote learning.

The layout of schools resembles the layout of prisons. Instead, schools should be flexible and encourage different ways of learning.

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Why getting the university digital experience right will attract more international students

“Students expect their university’s digital experiences to be as good as services like Facebook, Amazon or Netflix”

Historically a strong university brand has to a certain extent guaranteed student numbers and in turn high National Student Survey scores, but for the current TikTok generation of students who expect high-quality and personalised digital experiences in every aspect of their lives, their education is no exception.

Yet despite the Covid pandemic accelerating the move to digital, most UK universities are still not offering what students would regard as ‘state of the art’ digital experiences. The result – a digital experience gap between what students expect from their universities and what is being offered.

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New minimum standards for boarding schools – view from the Guardianship sector…

“Key commercial organisations in the sector agree that closer collaboration will be needed between schools and guardians once the new standards are in place”

The Department for Education’s updated National Minimum Standards for Boarding Schools will come into effect from September 5 2022 and apply to boarding schools in England.

The document contains 23 Standards across all areas of governance, including: boarding provision; health and wellbeing; safeguarding & health and safety. One of the major changes of the updated NMS is a new standard dedicated to educational guardians.

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Higher education needs international student engagement more than ever – and the solution is clear

“Set up right, chatbots in higher education can handle over 80% of all queries”

International student engagement is crucial to higher education, from the first touch to the last. Each interaction is vital – from engaging with prospective students to support admission targets, to connecting with current students to ensure they feel supported and don’t add to the worryingly-high dropout rates.

However, many departments are struggling to connect with international students, and it’s having a clear and damaging effect. In the 2020-21 academic year, the number of international students at US colleges fell by 15%, according to the Institute of International Education and the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

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Schools wanting to compete for top international faculty need robust integration strategies

“Faculty willing to migrate to work for you are usually happy to relocate to work for your competitors”

Growing diversity has been a key objective in the business world for a few decades now, as international corporations realise bringing a mix of people to the table introduces fresh ideas and allows for continuous innovation.

It’s been no stranger to the higher education sector either, especially for institutions that teach business and management. From the executive level down to bachelor courses, having a diverse cohort of students and participants has been (rightly) deemed an important issue.

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