An Overview of Trends and Challenges in Higher Education on the Worldwide Research Agenda

Elena Tikhonova,Lilia Raitskaya

doi:10.17323/2411-7390-2018-4-4-4-7

Abstract

Being a crucial part of the JLE scope, higher education is witnessing an era of supra-national, national, and institutional changes, including massification via massive online open courses (MOOC), politically launched or influenced trends like the Bologna process, increasing academic mobility spurred by globalisation and continued development of internationalised education, interculturality and multiligualism, worldwide innovations in higher education and teaching approaches (deep active learning, blended learning methods, gamification, storytelling, alignments of higher education and work, translanguaging in higher education instruction). Further, the JLE editors dwell upon other relevant issues, including transformation of universities, student-teacher relationship, social equity and access to higher education, students’ engagement and commitment to learning, university excellence factors.The editorial entails some guidelines for potential authors regarding priority themes JLE is going to promote within its scope.

Highlights

Being a crucial part of the JLE scope, higher education is witnessing an era of supra-national, national, and institutional changes, including massification via massive online open courses (MOOC), politically launched or influenced trends like the Bologna process, increasing academic mobility spurred by globalisation and continued development of internationalised education, interculturality and multiligualism, worldwide innovations in higher education and teaching approaches
A lot of studies are focused on different aspects of those reforms: starting from neo-liberal foundation and approaches to higher education (Gerrard, 2015; Zepke, 2018), universities’ striving for excellence and competitiveness (Mok, 2015; Hostings, 2015; Song, 2018), country-related reform specialities (Coome, 2015; Noyes & Adkins, 2016) to quality revolution in tertiary education (Minina, 2017), re-defining quality of higher education and its factors (Little, 2015; Cheng, 2017; Scharager, Goldenberg, 2018), and pitfalls it faces (Cardoso, Rosa, & Stensaker, 2016)
New challenges and pitfalls relating to massification in higher education cover a paucity of resources for MOOCs, increased workload for the academia at large, partial loss of autonomy for the professoriate, declining quality of education by various criteria (Akalu, 2016)

Summary

Introduction

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Elena Tikhonova, National Research University Higher School of Economics, 26 Shabolovka, Moscow, Russian Federation, 119049. Being a crucial part of the JLE scope, higher education is witnessing an era of supra-national, national, and institutional changes, including massification via massive online open courses (MOOC), politically launched or influenced trends like the Bologna process, increasing academic mobility spurred by globalisation and continued development of internationalised education, interculturality and multiligualism, worldwide innovations in higher education and teaching approaches (deep active learning, blended learning methods, gamification, storytelling, alignments of higher education and work, translanguaging in higher education instruction).

Results

Conclusion