This paper assesses the effect of need-based grants on the performance of university students in Italy. We performed a series of between-universities and within-universities propensity score matching analyses to evaluate the effect of grants on several student performance indicators, such as dropout rate, first year credits and efficiency of…

The quality of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) is an important topic to be addressed by different stakeholders: higher education institutions, MOOC providers, education companies, educational providers. National and international agencies are or will be deeply involved in preparing or attending common guidelines in order to fulfill quality of…

Institutional accreditation is an important factor for U.S. institutions in determining if credit or degrees from another institution will be accepted. However, accreditation as we understand it does not often exist outside the United States. This 60-Second Survey, in partnership with the Association of International Credential Evaluators (AICE)…

The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) initiated a series of surveys designed to capture member institutional practice snapshots in 60 seconds or less. The December 2014 "AACRAO 60 Second Survey" asked respondents to indicate their institutions' credit for prior learning practices (CPL). To…

This article describes an action research (AR) study with multiple cycles undertaken with undergraduates over three years. The university is a trilingual institution in Italy where degree programmes are taught in Italian, German and English. The study's aim was to improve the syllabus of an advanced English for Specific Purposes course using a…

The paper is focused on an interesting aspect of accounting education: based on the analysis of the syllabi of "Economia Aziendale" ("EA") from all 65 Italian universities teaching economics or business administration, strong inconsistencies emerge among themselves and between syllabi and theory. The choice of the analysed…

This article presents the findings of a field experiment in medical English with first-year medical students at the University of Pavia, Northern Italy. Working in groups of 8-10, the students were asked to produce a corpus of medical texts in English demonstrating how the human body is itself a meaningful text (Baldry and Thibault 2006: Ch. 1).…

In Italy, accreditation of prior learning is a sensitive issue. Despite the lack of laws or qualification frameworks regulating the recognition of non-formal and informal learning, most Italian universities proceed with caution, allowing only a restricted number of credits in the university curriculum related to practical activities or to external…

The primary purpose of this study lies in the evaluation of what students acquire from studies abroad in the context of credit mobility, in terms of competence development and personal growth, compared with that gained by students completing their study or internship in their home country. A pre-post test design, with both an experimental group…

The European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) programme aims at testing practical skills and competences in using ICT tools. This paper presents the results of a monitoring exercise aimed at analyzing the impact of the ECDL programme in the Italian Universities. The ECDL programme, adopted in most Italian Universities since the year 2000, has…

This article focuses on Italy's Higher Education reforms and hotly debated developments. These developments are experience credits and online universities. The reform replaced the existing degree system, in which most undergraduate programs lasted four years--although the average graduate actually took more than seven years to earn a degree--with…

"Chronicle of Higher Education" presents an abundant source of news and information for college and university faculty members and administrators. This January 16, 2004 issue of "Chronicle for Higher Education" contains the following articles: (1) "Gymnasium, Ecology Lab, Sentinel" (Selingo, Jeffrey); (2) "Fewer…