EUNIS - European University Information Systems

Educause annual conference 2014, visits to MIT & University of Central Florida: French delegation report

A French delegation was officially formed to participate in the annual Educause conference. It was decided to take advantage of the trip to the United States to visit two universities, MIT in Boston and the University of Central Florida in Orlando. This report follows the feedback meeting held in Paris and covers the two day-long university visits and the various workshops attended at the Educause conference itself.

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The Higher Education Challenge in Africa and Asia

Higher Education is one of the most important challenges of the 21^st century in Asia and Africa. Reports say that one should open one university every day! Moreover these countries face a critical shortage of quality professors but also of governance and management. Funding is very limited and their capacity to answer successfully to this challenge is doubtful. Modern technologies by themselves will never replace good quality teachers. However, when adapted to the local cultures and social environment they may be of great help to go in the right direction.

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E-Learning in European Higher Education Institutions: Results of a Mapping Survey conducted in Oct – Dec 2013

With the emergence of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) it seemed that, beyond the bounds of the e-learning communities and their activities, generally, little attention had been paid to how information technologies (ICT) impacted higher education teaching and learning. There were voices pointing out that the rise of MOOCS was just one particular, albeit spectacular element, of the much broader agenda of digitalisation (i.e., e- and online learning), in which many universities have been involved for quite some time. While this is difficult to prove, the recent heated debates on the strategic importance of e- and ICT-based learning for European higher education, and predictions made about the future of higher education, revealed a lack of European-level data on e-learning in higher education.

It was for this reason that EUA decided to conduct this survey, in order to be in a better position to contribute to ongoing policy discussions, and to support our members in their efforts to further enhance and promote innovation in learning and teaching.

The results of this survey are surprising. Apart from a few notable exceptions, almost all institutions are involved in some forms of e-learning. It seems that there has been no sudden and disruptive change, but rather that a gradual adaptation has taken place, which continues at different paces and scales across Europe. Nevertheless institutional responses to MOOCs do suggest that European higher education institutions are capable of responding swiftly to new strategic challenges.

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