Emulating Erasmus? Turkey’s Mevlana exchange program in higher education

The article deals with the concept of quality and compliance in the context of the short-cycle professional higher education (SCHE) program in the field of real estate management. The article highlights the role of graduates and employers in assessing the quality and compliance and surveys of students as well. The surveys of students, graduates and employers and the analysis of legislation allow assessing the quality and compliance of SCHE study program in real estate management. Currently, in Latvia, the qualification of a house manager can be obtained at three accredited higher education institutions, studying in a short-cycle professional higher education program, which, in accordance with European Qualifications Framework (EQF), is the first-level professional higher education program. The article will mainly focus on the quality and compliance of the house managers’ professional qualification acquisition in short-cycle higher education programs in Latvia. Data analysis, synthesis and logical construction methods have been used in this article.

This study investigates the management and effectiveness of Tahfizh Al-Qur'an programs in higher education, focusing on the Institute of Qur'anic Sciences (IIQ) in Jakarta, through the application of the CIPP model. It explores the alignment between program objectives and institutional missions (context), the sufficiency and strategic utilization of resources (input), the methods and effectiveness of program implementation (process), and the outcomes achieved in terms of student development and program impact (product). Adopting a qualitative approach, the study employs surveys, interviews, and document analysis to provide an in-depth understanding of the governance frameworks at these institutions. The findings highlight notable achievements in advancing Quranic and moral education while identifying challenges in resource allocation, process efficiency, and stakeholder engagement. This paper offers valuable insights into ways to enhance and expand educational programs by improving governance structures and addressing contemporary challenges without compromising the integrity of Quranic traditions. The study emphasizes the importance of integrating modern practices with traditional values in Tahfizh programs within higher education.

Aim/Purpose: This paper encourages the reader to think about the role history, or foundations, plays in graduate programs in the field of higher education. In so doing it looks at the types of conversations scholars in other fields and disciplines have had concerning the value of teaching students to think historically in settings where history is not the primary mode of scholarship, before thinking critically about the conversation we have had as it concerns higher education graduate programs. Background: In many ways higher education programs have a complicated relationship with history. In some ways it can be seen as a central pursuit and in other ways it can be seen as a marginal scholarly activity. These two conflicting paradigms of central and marginal reflect a lack of scholarly discussion on what the field wants and expects from history. Methodology: This paper considers the scholarly discussion that has happened in three fields apart from higher education administration in an attempt to suggest ways that scholars in higher education programs might conceptualize the value and role that history should play in our graduate programs. Contribution: This paper invites scholars to think about what they want and expect students to gain from coursework on the history of higher education in comparison to what other fields have seen as the major reasons for including similar coursework. Findings: Despite a generalized commitment to teaching the foundations of higher education, the field has not been clear about what it expects students to gain from this type of coursework. Although it is easy to suggest that teaching foundations is important, there has been limited scholarly work that meaningfully grapples with questions about the value of foundations in higher education programs. Recommendations for Practitioners: As practitioners and researchers, we need to better articulate what we think foundations brings to graduate students in higher education programs and we need to do so in a manner that creates a single coherent paradigm for students. Recommendation for Researchers: (Included in Recommendations for Practitioners)

The purpose of this article is to identify the features of the implementation of a pilot project to improve the system of higher legal education on the example of the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University. Methodology: to prepare the article, general scientific and private scientific research methods were used, including analysis, synthesis, system method, formal legal method, modeling method. Conclusions. The article presents the results of the first stage of the pilot project to improve the system of higher legal education, including the development of independently established educational standards and educational programs of basic and specialized higher education. A distinctive feature of the new educational standard is that it establishes requirements for the implementation of educational programs not for one level of education, but for an enlarged group of specialties and areas of training for basic and specialized levels of higher education. The requirements for the terms of education have been changed. The developed educational program of basic higher education assumes a period of study of 5 years. The programs of specialized higher education — Master›s degree are differentiated into applied and research with an appropriate training period of 1 or 2 years. Scientific and practical significance. The paper presents a new approach to the creation and implementation of educational programs of higher education in the field of jurisprudence. The presented conclusions and suggestions can be used by educational organizations of higher education during the development of new educational programs of basic and specialized levels of higher education.

The New Academics Transitioning into Higher Education Project, known as NATHEP, is part of a national collaborative project in Higher Education (HE), focused on the professional development of academic staff developers who are involved in the induction programmes of new academics transitioning into HE. Using a cascading model of staff development, NATHEP explored structural and cultural opportunities and constraints that inhibited or promoted the emergence of critical induction programmes to respond to new academics’ needs and to the needs of students. Given the complexity and contested nature of the current higher education landscape (UCDP, 2018), new academics face numerous challenges as they embed themselves in disciplinary and institutional contexts. With systemic conditions not being conducive to critical agency and social justice, current induction practices for new academics are inadequate to the task of transformation in higher education (Behari-Leak, 2015), making new academics especially vulnerable (Behari-Leak, 2017). NATHEP focused on developing a national orientation to induction practices and principles across the sector. Twenty academic staff developers from 10 universities were supported to initiate and convene well-theorised and conceptualised induction programmes in their institutional contexts, to address historical and systemic challenges and to contribute to the transformation of higher education. Using Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism as meta-theoretical framing and Margaret Archer’s social realist theory, this book offers a theorised account of how academic staff developers, in devising models of induction practice for new academics at their universities, engaged with enabling and constraining conditions at institutional, faculty, departmental and university classroom levels. Through an analysis of institutional case studies, this project explores a range of agential choices exercised by staff developers to conceptualise and contextualise induction programmes, relative to how they, as well as their new academics, mediate contested spaces. A nuanced social and critical account of the material, ideational and agential conditions in HE shows that the courses of action taken by new academics are driven through their concerns, commitments and projects in higher education. A further aim of this project was to see if academic staff developers would be driven by corresponding but different concerns and commitments. Drawing on Margaret Archer’s social realism and Bhaskar’s critical realism, the Seven Scalar Being (2010) was used as a heuristic for both the methodological and pedagogical approach taken. Through this ontological laminar, the project explored and analysed what critical professional development looks like (Kohli et al, 2015) across seven levels of reality. In addition to working from the premise that the positive exercise of agency is a marked feature of new participants in HE despite contextual challenges (Leibowitz, et.al., 2016), NATHEP also explored, if at a conceptual level, the structural and cultural contexts might act as a trigger or dampener for academic staff developers’ agency. Importantly, we needed to know the extent to which contexts would have immediate implications for ways in which professional and academic development programmes are conceptualised and implemented. It was hoped that with an alternative theorisation and creation of conducive conditions for the uptake of critical agency, in both disciplinary and departmental programmes, staff developers would create emergent induction programmes for new academics, that are contextualised, sensitised, responsive and informed. To this end, the creation of a framework to infuse criticality into professional development practices was a highlight of NATHEP’s scholarly work. The CRiTiCAL framework is offered here as the project’s contribution to knowledge generation. Via this heuristic, which was used to embed relevant and contextual practices and values into otherwise generic induction, NATHEP was able to reorientate staff developers and their institutions to their ethical obligation to introduce newcomers to the sector and their institutions in ways that could really help them to “hit the ground running”. Through a collaborative, consultative and inclusive methodology, and based on a cascading model (discussed later) of staff development, NATHEP prepared staff development practitioners to exercise their agency by engaging with knowledge in relevant and generative ways and to create inclusive and participatory teaching and learning experiences that are responsive to institutional, regional and national challenges.

The article focuses on the modern aspects of higher professional education program acquisition in Russia. Besides, the existing peculiarities and requirements related to the teaching tools of future specialists as well as the results of the study of the learning process at the university during the period of distance learning are presented. Pedagogical design acts as the main tool for creating modern teaching aids for university students, which makes it possible to apply uniform principles and approaches to structuring. In the context of distance learning of higher education programs, the form of presentation of the studied information has lost its significance, the peculiarities of the perception of this information, depending on the education goals, basic education, and development conditions have come to the fore. The teaching aids that are most effectively used to achieve various goals in various conditions by heterogeneous groups of students are designated as universal. Significant characteristics of universal teaching aids were identified, such as color design of pages, font size, selection of relatively independent blocks of information. The results of the survey indicated an increase in the quality of assimilation of those materials that combined information on the topic, reference information and the maximum possible visualization in the form of pictures, drawings, diagrams, and sample tables. In modern conditions of optimization of the system of vocational education and general informatization, the content and structure ensuring adequate perception of information through the variability, the most accurate visualization of information.

Although research on Canadian higher education has advanced considerably over the past few decades, the opportunities for university level study of higher education in Canada are still quite limited. Only four universities offer higher education programs; only one has a higher education department; and only a handful of other institutions offer even a course in higher education. The number of students enrolled in higher education programs in Canada is about 200, compared to about 6,000 in the United States; the number of faculty about 15 compared to 700 in the U.S. Moreover, while American higher education journals have, since the early 1970's, regularly featured articles about university higher education programs, there has not been a single article on this subject in The Canadian Journal of Higher Education. This paper attempts to fill some of that gap by providing some basic information about the study of higher education in Canadian universities and by examining the role of these programs in the overall development of higher education research and the possible reasons for the very limited scale of such programs in Canada. The author's conclusion is that the factor which has most limited the development of higher education studies in Canadian universities is neither insufficient student demand nor limited employment opportunities of graduates, but reluctance of Canadian universities to allocate resources for this area of study. This reluctance is attributed to the combination of the low prestige of higher education as a field of study and the lack of a strong lobby for this program area outside the university. It is suggested that - in contrast to their American counterparts - presently Canadian higher education programs have less than the minimum resources necessary to make the advances that would be required to overcome this "prestige barrier".

This paper investigates the evolution of software project support for teaching and research projects in higher education. It therefore analyses the results of two surveys conducted with students of the department of computer science of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hannover in February 2009 and November 2010. The surveys focused on examining the experiences and requirements of the students. Beneath mere technical requirements the surveys also investigate the acceptance of social software elements in project support. Since containing a core of equal questions the answers to the two surveys allow to deduce trends. These trends towards more sophisticated supportive software tools and environments are further investigated not only to allow a better support for projects, but also to make projects more visible and valuable, preserving their achievements and making them accessible for others.

The research is aimed at identifying the peculiarities of higher education internationalization in the Republic of Belarus. The research objectives included the analysis of legislative and institutional sides of higher education internationalization and the evaluation of geographical priorities of higher education services export by Belarus. The research into higher education internationalization was initiated by Western researchers, including J. Knight, H. de Wit, P.G. Altbach, B. Leask, S. Robson, and others. However, the research into Belarusian higher education internationalization has started very recently and mostly covers the results of European projects in higher education conducted in Belarus. Therefore, the peculiarities and prospects of Belarusian higher education internationalization have not yet been considered sufficiently. Having analyzed the legislation in higher education, the authors concluded that the export of higher education became the priority of internationalization. Most policy documents set the aim of increasing the number of international students by improving the positions of Belarusian universities in international rankings and networking with foreign universities. Therefore, it may be concluded that Belarusian authorities interpret higher education internationalization from a very utilitarian point of view. Thus, it is not mainly aimed at improving the quality of higher education. Having considered the international students statistics the authors identified three geographical directions of Belarusian higher education export, namely Turkmenistan (the country providing almost half of international students in Belarus), China (the country of origin for most students receiving education abroad in the world), and Uzbekistan (the country that has significantly increased the number of students coming to Belarus recently). The geographical structure of Belarusian higher education export turned out to be very unbalanced because of the dominance of Turkmen students. However, Belarusian export of higher education to this country is now endangered by Turkmen educational policy hindering the outflow of school-leavers. Since Belarusian higher education has a very low ranking at Chinese labor market, the export of Belarusian higher education to China may grow but for a little only. Taking into account that the educational cooperation with Uzbekistan has activated recently, the export of Belarusian higher education to Uzbekistan is likely to increase within the following several years. Thus, the authors forecast the changes in geographical priorities of Belarusian higher education export. However, the advantages that made international students choose Belarus, namely stability and security, are endangered by the current political situation in the country. Therefore, the future of Belarusian export of higher education depends significantly on achieving fast political settlement.

This report has shown that there are areas of commonality and areas of diversity in existing communications programs in higher education. The undergraduate and graduate curricular structure reflects, for the most part, the stated objectives of the program. Several questions remain to be answered: “What is being accomplished under the communications label that could not otherwise be accomplished?” “What are some of the emerging trends in this rapidly growing field?” These topics will be covered in subsequent articles.

Students who plan to attend university frequently struggle with making decisions. The challenge of students' decision-making regarding study program selection in higher education arises from factors such as self-understanding, including intelligence, talents, and interests, as well as understanding of the educational environment and available information on study programs. The objective of this research is to create a recommendation model for high school students in Yogyakarta to choose information technology-based study programs. A model is employed to aid guidance and counseling teachers in offering guidance to high school students regarding their choice of study programs in higher education. This guidance is based on the students' self-awareness and understanding of their surroundings. The research described in this study follows the Borg and Gall model, which consists of 10 development steps in the field of research and development (RD). Data on the RPP-PT Model was obtained through questionnaires and interview guides. Data analysis involves the utilization of both quantitative and qualitative methods for analyzing data. The study presents a recommendation model for choosing information technology-based study programs in higher education. This model is designed to provide guidance and counseling teachers with recommendations for college study program choices based on students' learning achievement, general abilities, talents, and interests. External factors, including parental expectations, should be taken into account when considering future development.

The challenges facing the tourism industry and tourism educators call out for a new paradigm of tourism education. This requirement for this study is illustrated in the results obtained from the sector professionals and tourism graduates. This qualitative research has taken place in North Cyprus, through in-depth, face-to-face interviews with twenty-two representatives to identify the principle requirements for a contemporary tourism education degree that is consistent with the requirements of all stakeholders. Advanced apprenticeship programs in higher education may resolve the skills shortages in the tourism sector, with evidence of sector representatives outlining the need for learning and assessment to take place in the workplace and graduates outlining their preferred and most effective courses they have applied in the workplace to be those that had practical training elements. The results of this study can serve as a model for developing programs for other tourism and hospitality educational institutes.

This paper discusses the state of digital citizenship in higher education, with a focus on literature review and educational approaches, pedagogical strategies, and challenges for improvement. It includes a survey of 60 respondents, which explores students’ perceptions and experiences related to digital citizenship at the undergraduate level of studies. This research examines the key aspects of digital citizenship education, pedagogical methods, various strategies and their effectiveness, demographic factors, limitations of current research, the role of technology and the challenges that educators face, curriculum changes, and development. By promoting digital citizenship education activities, institutions, and educators are expected to contribute through collaboration with the private sector, and student engagement and activism. The study found that rapid technological advancements were perceived as limitations in digital citizenship education. The findings show that respondents strongly favor comprehensive ways to teach digital citizenship, often endorsing multifaceted tactics covering a range of subject areas. Hence, there is broad recognition of the impact of demographic factors such as gender, age, and socioeconomic status on students’ perception of digital citizenship education. The results highlight the potential of digital skills enhancement and learning and the evolving of digital platforms in higher education study programs, the need for diverse teaching methods, integrated curriculum, and improvement of collaboration between educational institutions and the private sector. This research adds to the general knowledge of digital citizenship education, by providing insights for higher education institutions, students, educators, and policymakers, for developing inclusive digital citizenship programs in higher education.

With researchers funnelled into lucrative research practices that value fast scholarship, we explore ethical practice as an ethico-onto-epistemological project. Through collective biography, diffractive choreography, and poetry, we map systems of entrapment that manifest power relations in the academy. We argue the posthumanist ethical practice is an intra-active project in higher education – involving rich material, social, political and intellectual entanglements. Posthumanist ethical practice rejects dualisms of body/mind, nature/culture and human/non-human. It evokes creativity to generate new vocabularies for challenging anthropocentric ‘exceptionalism’. Mapping relations in posthuman assemblages can involve agential cuts that evoke ethical practice as affective encounters. Agential cuts give permission for pedagogic storying where there is ontological connectedness. As academics, we are immersed in assemblages where posthumanist education research and practice is a rich, embodied, and connected process. Particular consideration is given in this article to affectivity and the value of pedagogic performance in education research.

The article analyzes the implementation of Erasmus+ projects in the Republic of Moldova based on the example of a capacity-building project in higher education – Elevate. The comparison of the established objectives and the results obtained of the targeted project, including in terms of their quality and usefulness, is framed in the general context of carrying out such projects in the Republic of Moldova. The analysis revealed the inefficient use of European funds and the need of impact assessments and ex-post evaluations of European Union projects in the field of higher education implemented at the local level.