The Emergence of Liberal Arts and Sciences Education in Europe: A Comparative Perspective

What Does Globalization Mean for Educational Change? A Comparative Approach

Abstract. In the sphere of modern higher education, the following main requirements to the performance level of modern professional of any profile can be distinguished: comprehensive fundamental expertise, capacity to work in the team, fast mastering of new technologies, self-education skills and ability to conduct creative work and research. These qualities of a specialist become the main objectives and reference points in building the modern system of higher education that would contribute to creation of expertise, respective access, management, dissemination and achievement control. The requirements to medical education are one of the most precise, especially on the background of critical demographic situation in the world, in general, and in Ukraine, in particular. The participation of the Ukrainian system of higher education in the Bologna reforms should be aimed only at its development and acquisition of new quality features without losing the best traditions and decrease of its national quality standards. Orientation towards Bologna process should not cause the excessive restructuring of the national education system. The main aim of Bologna process is to create a unified, all-European, strong and competitive education system (first of all, with the American education system), and also expand the possibilities for employment of future professionals. The European Credit Transfer System was implemented in Ukraine in 2005 and is aimed at the development of national school. This system enables transfer of credits from different educational institutions and it expands the access to the European education, leads to the modernization of European education and provides more efficient training of graduating specialists. Therefore, the higher educational institutions of our country constantly take the measures towards improvement of teaching and education process and methods of education using different forms of knowledge control. Having as an objective the control of education results and evaluation of efficiency of study, the objective monitoring of knowledge and skills that provides for the use of its different forms, becomes an integral part of the educational process. The Bologna declaration forms the model of European higher education with consideration of the specific features and traditions of the national educational systems. One of the key criteria of the implementation efficiency of credit-modular system of educational process organization is advancement of higher professional education quality. However, the implementation of surgical educational programs has a series of problematic issues. In the article, we describe the inclusion of the Ukrainian medical education into Bologna process, the stages of creation of Bologna educational system in Ukraine. We introduce the conceptual peculiarities of higher medical education reforms within the context of medical reforms in Ukraine. We have shown the credit-modular system of educational process organization in the Ukrainian education and demonstrated the advantages of credit transfer system in medical education. We also have added to the concept of higher medical school reforms in the context of medical reforms in Ukraine.

This essay has two primary goals. First, it seeks to define liberal art and sciences as a system of higher education that involves curricular breadth as well as depth, student-centered teaching and academic and administrative structures which facilitate learning. Second, it makes the case for liberal arts and sciences education and why it responds to the demands of the XXIst century. The essay is informed by experiences of liberal arts and sciences education across not only in the United States, where it has found its greatest influence, but by the growing movement to experiments in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and Asia. At its core, liberal arts and sciences education is concerned about the development of students and their capacity to learn, to express ideas and communicate effectively, and to adapt to changing circumstances. In countries where vocational training, hyper-specialization and didactic pedagogic approaches dominate higher education, liberal arts and sciences education can offer an alternative that will resonate amongst students and faculty. It is not an easy system to adapt, but for many, the rewards have been well worth the investment.

Whereas liberal arts and sciences education arguably has European roots, European universities have evolved over the last century to become advanced research institutions, mainly offering academic training in specialized disciplines. The Bologna process, started by the European Union in the late nineties, encouraged European institutions of higher education to broaden their curricula and to commit to undergraduate education with increased vigor. One of the results is that Europe is currently witnessing a proliferation of liberal arts and sciences colleges and broad bachelor degrees. This edited volume fills a gap in the literature by providing reflections on the recent developments in Europe with regard to higher education in the liberal arts and sciences. The first section includes reflections from either side of the Atlantic about the nature and aims of liberal arts and sciences education and the way in which it takes shape, or should take shape in European institutions of higher learning. The edited volume takes as a distinct approach to liberal arts and sciences education by focusing on the unique way in which core texts – i.e. classic texts from philosophical, historical, literary or cultural traditions involving “the best that has been written” – meet the challenges of modern higher education in general and in Europe in particular. This approach is manifested explicitly in the second section that focuses on how specific core texts promote the goals of liberal arts and sciences education, including the teaching methods, curricular reflections, and personal experiences of teaching core texts. The edited volume is based on a selection of papers presented at a conference held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in September 2015. It is meant to impart the passion that teachers and administrators share about developing the liberal arts and sciences in Europe with the help of core texts in order to provide students with a well-rounded, formative, and genuinely liberal education.

Whereas liberal arts and sciences education arguably has European roots, European universities have evolved over the last century to become advanced research institutions, mainly offering academic training in specialized disciplines. The Bologna process, started by the European Union in the late nineties, encouraged European institutions of higher education to broaden their curricula and to commit to undergraduate education with increased vigor. One of the results is that Europe is currently witnessing a proliferation of liberal arts and sciences colleges and broad bachelor degrees. This edited volume fills a gap in the literature by providing reflections on the recent developments in Europe with regard to higher education in the liberal arts and sciences. The first section includes reflections from either side of the Atlantic about the nature and aims of liberal arts and sciences education and the way in which it takes shape, or should take shape in European institutions of higher learning. The edited volume takes as a distinct approach to liberal arts and sciences education by focusing on the unique way in which core texts – i.e. classic texts from philosophical, historical, literary or cultural traditions involving “the best that has been written” – meet the challenges of modern higher education in general and in Europe in particular. This approach is manifested explicitly in the second section that focuses on how specific core texts promote the goals of liberal arts and sciences education, including the teaching methods, curricular reflections, and personal experiences of teaching core texts. The edited volume is based on a selection of papers presented at a conference held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in September 2015. It is meant to impart the passion that teachers and administrators share about developing the liberal arts and sciences in Europe with the help of core texts in order to provide students with a well-rounded, formative, and genuinely liberal education.

Abstract. In the sphere of modern higher education, the following main requirements to the performance level of modern professional of any profile can be distinguished: comprehensive fundamental expertise, capacity to work in the team, fast mastering of new technologies, self-education skills and ability to conduct creative work and research. These qualities of a specialist become the main objectives and reference points in building the modern system of higher education that would contribute to creation of expertise, respective access, management, dissemination and achievement control.
 The requirements to medical education are one of the most precise, especially on the background of critical demographic situation in the world, in general, and in Ukraine, in particular. The participation of the Ukrainian system of higher education in the Bologna reforms should be aimed only at its development and acquisition of new quality features without losing the best traditions and decrease of its national quality standards. Orientation towards Bologna process should not cause the excessive restructuring of the national education system. The main aim of Bologna process is to create a unified, all-European, strong and competitive education system (first of all, with the American education system), and also expand the possibilities for employment of future professionals.
 The European Credit Transfer System was implemented in Ukraine in 2005 and is aimed at the development of national school. This system enables transfer of credits from different educational institutions and it expands the access to the European education, leads to the modernization of European education and provides more efficient training of graduating specialists.
 Therefore, the higher educational institutions of our country constantly take the measures towards improvement of teaching and education process and methods of education using different forms of knowledge control. Having as an objective the control of education results and evaluation of efficiency of study, the objective monitoring of knowledge and skills that provides for the use of its different forms, becomes an integral part of the educational process.
 The Bologna declaration forms the model of European higher education with consideration of the specific features and traditions of the national educational systems. One of the key criteria of the implementation efficiency of credit-modular system of educational process organization is advancement of higher professional education quality. However, the implementation of surgical educational programs has a series of problematic issues.
 In the article, we describe the inclusion of the Ukrainian medical education into Bologna process, the stages of creation of Bologna educational system in Ukraine. We introduce the conceptual peculiarities of higher medical education reforms within the context of medical reforms in Ukraine. We have shown the credit-modular system of educational process organization in the Ukrainian education and demonstrated the advantages of credit transfer system in medical education. We also have added to the concept of higher medical school reforms in the context of medical reforms in Ukraine.

Higher education systems in Europe are currently undergoing deep reforms. These reforms are triggered by national developments, as well as by the aim to evolve towards comparable systems and ensure the quality of the higher education systems in Europe (Bologna Process). This study was initiated by the education trade unions’ goal to widen the scope of the debate on accreditation and evaluation activities in higher education in Europe from a comparative perspective. In order to provide the factual base for this discussion, we were asked to carry out a comparative study of ‘accreditation in the framework of evaluation activities’ in the European higher education area. Accreditation is the focus of our study, but accreditation is a policy instrument made up of two elements: evaluation and approval. Therefore, we felt it necessary to analyse these two elements in their own right. Hence, the aims of the study are to: 1. Provide an updated picture of the current situation with regard to (1) accreditation schemes, (2) other approval schemes (outside accreditation) and (3) evaluation schemes. 2. Analyse the underlying principles of the accreditation scheme(s) and how they relate to other approval and evaluation schemes (‘system logic’ or ‘system dynamic’). 3. Point out and analyse current reforms of the accreditation scheme(s) (with a view to other approval and evaluation schemes as well as supra-national developments, e.g. the Bologna process and other influences). KeywordsHigh EducationHigh Education InstitutionEvaluation SchemeHigh Education SystemPrivate High EducationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

In the framework of the trends of development of Higher Education in Europe and all over the world, especially with the Bologna Process, The National Strategy of Higher Education, N S H E2008-2013, has put forward the main problems of the system of higher education so that Albania may have its own place in the European Higher Education Area.One of the main problems has been thereformation ofhigher education, the improvement of the teaching system and scientific research which until now have been completely separated from each other, the scientific research was carried out in the research institutes outside of the higher education, which were mainly subject to theScienceAcademy. The reforms undertaken in the area of higher education and of the base research aim at the integration of these two systems in the system of higher education having as the primary goal the increase of quality in universities especially in the second and third cycle of study.Through this article we want to present an innovation in the system of public higher education, the integration of the scientific research with the process of teaching in the higher education, to expose the priorities, the performance, the weaknesses which are observed, the reasons and the future perspectives

Higher education is a social structure for the control and distribution of advanced thought and technique. Its basic organizational forms are locations for discovering, conserving, refining, transmitting, and applying advanced ideas and skills, with the handling of knowledge materials thereby made a common thread in the many specific activities of academic workers. Compared to other social institutions and to education at lower levels, the configuration of tasks is uniquely knowledge intensive and knowledge extensive. In every national system, a set of operational units concentrates intensively on specialized fields of knowledge across a spectrum that may range from archeology to zoology and includes dozens of specialties as diverse as civil engineering, French literature, constitutional law, high-energy physics, and child psychology. This highly unusual broad coverage of finely tuned specialties grows in scale along with the general enlargement of knowledge in society. The inordinate and growing complexity of tasks, while long sensed by thoughtful practitioners and observers, has in the main been obscured by simplistic statements about the purposes of higher education. Doctrines that define the university as an intellectual community confronting major issues, or state the purposes of higher education as teaching, research, and service, serve poorly as accounts of what is done. At best, they function as useful ideologies that throw a net of legitimacy over diverse activities. Around the multitude of knowledge tasks, each national system of higher education has a historically derived arrangement. The specific country structures vary in such characteristics as breadth of coverage and the inclusion or exclusion of particular fields and points of view within them. Of primary importance is the prevailing array of operating units, the primary differentiated structure, that historically has been granted, or has acquired, control over the numerous tasks. How is the work of research, scholarship, and training in so many fields distributed to groups? The patterned division of labor conditions a wide range of specific issues, such as access, certification, and graduate employment, and determines considerably the nature of the problems of coordination and control. All problems of serious re-form are just that, with the redivision and recombination of tasks generally at stake.

This Special Issue was conceived and developed following a series of international conferences held in Asia, with a particular focus on critically reflecting upon higher education development in the region from broader social and political economy perspectives. Some of the papers in this Special Issue were selected from presentations in the East Asia Social Policy (EASP) Research Network Conference successfully held in Taiwan in 2018, while others were chosen from international events held at Lingnan University in Hong Kong presenting critical reviews and reflections on internationalization, marketization and graduate employment of higher education in Asia. This introductory article puts the discussions of the selected papers in this issue in context, with critical reflections on the key issues being examined in these papers. The Special Issue is published when the world is still confronting the unprecedented global health crisis resulted from the outbreak of the COVID‐19 pandemic. This article discusses the higher education development trends in Asia through the massification, diversification and internationalisation processes in transforming the higher education system and examines how these development trends are affected by the COVID‐19 crisis.

The integration processes, which take place in the world community in all spheres of the human activity have a great influence on the system of higher education. During this period, the common European education space is formed, which expressed particularly through harmonization of education standards, approaches, curricula, and specialties in different countries of the world. The open educational space provides for the increasing of student mobility and co-operation of university lecturers from different countries, which should help to improve the university graduates’ employment system and increase the status of these countries in the field of education. Academic mobility is one of the areas of the Bologna Process, which ensures the integrity of the European Higher Education Area and the European Research Area. At the same time the European space means not only the space of the states of the European Union. This space covers the territories of all member states of the Bologna Process. The course for the development of academic mobility is enshrined in almost all major documents governing the Bologna process. They note that the academic mobility of students, researchers and lecturers allows its participants to take advantage of European educational values (Prague Communiqué of Ministers of Education 2001), which forms the basis for the formation of the European Higher Education Area (Berlin Communiqué 2003), is an essential element of the Bologna process, which creates the new opportunities for personal growth, development of cooperation between people and institutions (London Communiqué 2007), etc. It is very important to find out how much our country is involved in the process of academic exchanges and international cooperation in the field of education, especially with European countries, as far as the international academic mobility is an important factor in the process of European integration.

The article substantiates the priority tasks of reforming the system of higher education in Ukraine. The current state of higher professional education and its tasks are defined; the principles of modern European education are highlighted. Moreover, the components and functions of the organization of the educational process in higher education institutions are identified. The emphasis is placed on the development of pedagogical workers’ professional and pedagogical excellence, the raise of the level of their readiness to use personal development and information and communication technologies, electronic learning tools, information and analytical systems for managing the development of vocational education and students’ training. The recommendations of the European Higher Education Area regarding the development of higher education in the EU countries are substantiated. The author stresses that today one of the main principles of modern European education, which is responsible for the qualitative aspect of training and acquisition of professional competencies, is the mobility of students and teachers. It is noted that the influence of integration processes and the growing role of globalization cause the need to use the international educational standards in the field of education. The influence of reforming the system of higher education onto the creation of favorable conditions for the professional growth of a future specialist is substantiated. Over the last years the improving of the higher education quality have occupied the dominating place in the issues of ensuring the competitiveness of Ukraine’s educational system and training a personnel of a particullar qualification. The author also noted that the influence of integration processes, the growing role of globalization сause the need to use the international educational standards in the field of education. The impact of the higher education system reforming onto the creating of favorable conditions for the development of a person throughout its life, in particular, its professional growth, is theoretically grounded as the key to the development of national intellectual potential. The growing requirements for the quality of training specialists in proffesional education require further theoretical and practical development of the improvement of the system of higher professional education of Ukraine, its recognition in the European and world space, which will be an important step on the way to the professionalism of modern specialists.

Within the broader process of European integration, which is the pre-eminent political project in the Western Balkans, the Bologna process and the Lisbon Strategy ‘introduced a new and spectacular dynamic into the affairs of higher education in Europe’ (Neave 2002, p. 186), carrying the potential of transforming higher education ‘as fundamentally as the nation state changed the medieval universities’ (Corbett 2005, p. 192). In this analysis, Bologna and Lisbon are taken to further the same four basic objectives—mobility, employability, attractiveness, and competitiveness (see Neave 2002). While Bologna aims to reorganise higher education systems through three-cycle structures, comparable degrees, and qualification frameworks, the Lisbon Agenda focuses on making Europe a more attractive place to invest and work in, making knowledge and innovation the heart of growth, and creating more and better jobs.

У статті здійснено науково-теоретичний аналіз підходів та обґрунтування методологічного концепту побудови та функціонування системи якості вищої фармацевтичної освіти.

Purpose: The subject of the study is issues related to the reform of higher education systems taking into account the Bologna Process. As a theoretical and cognitive goal, the author adopted the presentation of the categories and conditions of the Bologna Process in its roman stage (2020). Design/methodology/approach: The article adopts methodological elements specific to the field of social sciences, including the monographic method. It is implemented in this work as a way of researching specific, individual cases and focuses on the overall recognition of one relevant problem. It is important here to verify each element of the phenomenon in question and focus on the individual components of the issue addressed based on qualitative descriptive elements. The paper draws on the printed publications of authors such as Irina Ferencz, Agnieszka Olechnicka, Tim Birtwistle, Robert Wagenaar, Jurgen Enders, Jeroen Huisman and continuous prints, including: Edukacja Ekonomistów i Menedżerów, Forum Akademickie, Education, Zeszyty Naukowe Politechniki Śląskiej, Studia Prawno Ekonomiczne, Białostockie Studia Prawnicze and Studia Prawnoustrojowe. Findings: The research problem was framed by the question: what changes are possible to implement in European higher education, under the Bologna harmonization formula, after the announcement of the Rome Communiqué in 2020? Practical implications: The practical objective was defined in the form of comments relevant to the needs for changes in the course of the Bologna Process with regard to multidegree education, quality assurance and recognition of periods of education, the social dimension of the Bologna Process and the internationalization of higher education. Originality/value: The study consists of three rudimentary parts, including a characterisation of the development of higher education and the implications for the region, and an analysis of the Bologna Process and its benefits for European higher education, as well as its most recent implications for higher education systems after the Rome 2020 conference. This characterisation fits into the thematic area of education management understood as a potential of the European region. This article addresses the issue of higher education development as a factor in regional development and aims to analyse the most up-to-date desiderata for harmonising higher education systems in Europe, particularly those raised at the Rome 2020 Ministerial Conference. Keywords: Higher (tertiary) education, Bologna Process, harmonisation. Category of the paper: Conceptual paper.