In recent years, the enhancement of learning and teaching has become a priority, not only for higher education institutions, but also for national governments, the European Union and the Bologna Process. This report aims to map the learning and teaching landscape in 28 higher education systems and to provide insight into how teaching enhancement…

Among pioneering European countries who started to establish a formal higher education quality assurance system in the 1980s, the Netherlands adopted one based on peer review and quality enhancement, which was replaced in 2003 by an accountability-oriented accreditation system under the substantial influence of the Bologna Process. Recently, the…

Wiljan van den Akker is a university professor, a respected academic administrator, and a published poet and writer. From a base at the Utrecht University, in the Netherlands, his three-decade long career spans three continents and includes one-on-one associations with Berkeley, UCLA and Oxford. Currently, he is the Vice-Rector for Research at…

Prepared for a Strategic Education Governance learning seminar, this working paper analyses the ways in which the Dutch government tried to reach overarching goals in education, in a system characterised by a high degree of distributed autonomy of education institutions and the participation of multiple actors, and consequently a government highly…

Since its formal inception in 1976, EU cooperation in the field of education has known a number of major landmarks: the launch of the Erasmus programme in 1987, the inclusion of education for the first time in the Treaty (Maastricht, 1992) and, last but not least, the role given to education and training in the new EU 10-year economic and social…

This article reviews the history of higher education governance and funding in The Netherlands, generalising when possible to other European countries. It finds that governance reforms and the funding of higher education appear to be driven by economic and demographic factors, including massification. Furthermore, the Bologna Process can be…

The nature of European education systems and their respective modes of governing education were principally determined by factors internal to individual countries until the early 1980s. After the extension of the European Union and the acceleration of globalization, European countries have adopted some features that exist in many countries around…

Globalization steers modern society and contributes significantly to the internationalization of higher education. New means of transport and communication expand educational and research opportunities worldwide and higher education is becoming a blossoming global industry. It is also seen as a vital part of national policy and the national…

The theoretical premise of this article is that policy is constructed and presented discursively. The Bologna process presents us with an example of such a policy construction process where the quality policy goals are set jointly in transnational settings, requiring different kinds of negotiations and discursive strategies. Discourse analysis of…

Analyzes the recent evolution in higher education linkages between northern and southern countries from individual academic projects toward broader development cooperation. Reviews different linkage programs in Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Focuses on key issues concerning organization, procedures, and support mechanisms, and raises…

This paper discusses the contribution of international studies on educational effectiveness in the light of 4 papers presented at the new ICSEI Methodology of Research and Effectiveness (MORE) Network in Barcelona in January 2005 and published in this issue of the journal. A brief historical overview is used to provide a context for these papers…

The focus of this article is on a comparison of the national policies for internationalisation in seven Western European countries (Austria, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom). In this comparison, it will be shown that the trend suggested in previous research of increasing economical rationales for…

In the context of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD), United Nations University (UNU) initiated the creation of a network of Regional Centres of Expertise (RCEs) for Education for Sustainable Development. This paper describes the philosophy behind the activities performed by one of those RCEs, RCE Rhine-Meuse, an RCE…

Reports on recent developments and problems in the diversification of tertiary education in seven Western European countries are presented by members of the Working Party on the Diversification of Tertiary Education. Policy analysis and evaluation and recommendations for future policy are also provided. As a policy, diversification refers to the…

This volume, the second of a two-volume publication, comprises 15 papers that present the work of individual European projects dealing with learning within organizations. These five chapters in Part 1, The Meaning of the Learning Organization, examine the conceptual frameworks and dilemmas at the heart of the notion of the learning organization:…