Editorial: Globalization and educational challenges of tertiary, vocational and community sectors in the Asia-Pacific

Abstract

The world saw a new era of globalization two decades ago. The momentum for a new economic order was signaled by political events, such as the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and technological breakthroughs like the emergence of dotcom enterprises in the Silicon Valley. Since then, the world has not looked back and publications on the consequences of globalization, especially its bearing on the economy, continue to proliferate. They drew one conclusion; knowledge is gradually replacing physical resources as the most important stimulus of economic growth. As higher education is one of the cradles of the knowledge economy, there is also keen interest to find out how it responds to the demands of the neworder after all these years. However, unless we have an idea of what challenges higher education faces, we do not have a context that helps us to understand why it chooses to respond the way it does. It is well-established in the literature that higher education has to contendwith an unprecedented global quest for better educational qualifications, amongst many other challenges. In his article, Wing On Lee reiterates some of these demands that are levelled on higher education before he discusses their implications and how it wrestles them. Besides surfacing the common approaches that higher education draws on, he also highlights the emergence of the entrepreneurial university, tasked first and foremost to manage the challenges that globalization unleashes. He ends on the note that the university should take on a more integrative role if it is to tackle these challenges more competently. Tan andPillay, likeWingOn, also anchor their study against the higher educationbackdrop, but they approach it from another perspective. They aremore concernedwith how adults learn within the university context in Malaysia. To help them evaluate the learning attributes, they make use of the Students’ Approaches to Learning framework, but being mindful that it is culturally biased, they adapt it for their study. They conclude that there are significant differences between the Malay and the Chinese adult learners when it comes to subscribing