Internationalising Higher Education

Love them or hate them, world university rankings have become a major force with the rapid internationalisation of higher education and are likely to become ever more influential. As governments across the world make the establishment of world-leading universities a key national economic policy priority and pay increasing attention to the tables, Phil Baty takes a stark look at the current rankings, highlighting their flaws and imperfections, and revealing some of the tricks and games played to manipulate the results. He will provide details of the major methodological and data collection changes being made by Times Higher Education to ensure that its world university rankings are established as the most
robust, transparent and authoritative in the international higher education community. Drawing on a range of examples and scenarios, Rebecca Hughes will show how the current international university ranking systems impact the setting up of cross-border, teaching-led
collaborations. She will argue that academic communities already have their own systems for the international evaluation of research (most notably peer review), and the aspect of collaborations which affects most students -teaching and learning - is much less well served by current ranking systems. She will suggest a move to produce more sophisticated and in-depth systems of rankings, such as the OECD's AHELO (Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes) project, which should aim to capture the kind of information that is central to those setting up international teaching collaborations. She will outline what kinds of criteria would be desirable in these contexts, and examine some of the delicate intercultural issues that cross-border comparisons of teaching and learning can bring. Fabrice H