Students believe their career prospects would have been improved by a stint working or studying abroad

Many people believe their career prospects would have been improved by a stint working or studying abroad, a poll has suggested.Almost four in five UK adults (79%) have not lived or studied overseas for six months or more, according to the British Council survey.Of these, more than a third (34%) said they believed that they would have had better job prospects if they had done so.

The survey, which questioned 2,114 UK adults between October 5 and 7, found that young people were most likely to feel they had missed out.More than half of the 18 to 24-year-olds who had not lived abroad said they believed their careers would be better if they had done so.Dr Jo Beall, the British Council's director of education and society, said: The good news is that this poll shows people are beginning to recognise how vital international skills are for enhancing their career.Research last year revealed that more UK employers look for international awareness and experience above academic qualifications.But the bad news is that not enough people in the UK are taking opportunities to gain international experience. That needs to change if the UK will successfully compete in the global economy.

Dealine for Paris application due Thursday, Nov. 1; other trips coming up

Tiffany Brown traveled to China this summer, and hopes to expand her horizons further next year.
In China, we climbed the Great Wall, visited the house of a master of kung-fu, took a dragon boat ride and visited four different cities, said Brown.The people were so friendly and treated us like celebrities.Brown recommends the study-abroad program to fellow students.It gives you a different opportunity to experience something that you can’t get from a book, she said. “It shows you the world in a whole new light. I did not have a low point while there.

Brown hopes to travel again.In 2013, UDM students will have the opportunity to travel to Brazil, France, China and Italy as part of the study-abroad program.We are partnering with Marygrove for the France trip, said Lara Wasner, director of Language and Cultural Training. “This is a great opportunity to work together and we hope that there are more opportunities to travel together in the future.The Brazil program, begun in 2005, has rotated through the College of Liberal Arts and Education, giving different faculty members an opportunity to teach, she said.The Italy program runs every summer through the College of Architecture, she said.I first visited China in 2010 and took ten students there last summer.

Two obstacles  time and money keep many students from participating, Wasner said.We want students to have an international experience at their time at the university,” she said. “Many students are not able to participate in the whole semester abroad, so the faculty-led trip is a great option, as students can learn and engage in cultural activities in the places that they are visiting.I do everything in my power to make this happen for students, she added.We have sponsorship forms, which helped one student pay for their entire trip. Financial aid can also be used. We want to make this happen for you.”

Last summer, Wasner and a group of students, faculty and alumni traveled to Cuba.Shelly Payne was among them. She said the experience changed her life.In the beginning, I didn’t want to go, but my mom forced me,” said Payne.I later learned that I have some Cuban lineage. I knew that Cuba existed, but I didn’t understand the whole essence of it. It is engrained in us not to like Cuba, but traveling there opened my eyes.The people are just like us so it made me wonder what the whole disagreement between our two countries was about,” she said.The people were so friendly and I loved dancing at the Buena Vista Social Club.With restrictions once again tightening regarding travel to Cuba, the program will not be running in 2013.But Wasner said that she looks forward to running it again in the future.Payne said that she plans on traveling to Brazil in 2013 and would also recommend studying abroad to anyone.I had no low points while in Cuba,” said Payne. “It was the experience of a lifetime. You don’t really gain a lot of knowledge if you are stuck in one place. It makes you a better person and a better teacher. If you do the trip right and go there for educational reasons and are open to opening yourself up, you will enjoy it.”

China scholarship 18,000 to study abroad in 2013

China will send 18,000 people to study abroad in 2013 under a government-funded scholarship program, the China Scholarship Council (CSC) announced on Tuesday.Those who are sponsored include 6,000 for graduate degree study, and 12,000 for undergraduate degree study or to take roles as senior researchers or visiting scholars, the CSC said at a conference in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province.

The number of scholarship recipients next year will be 2,000 more than in 2012, and more than double the 7,500 in 2006, according to the CSC.Currently, over 24,000 Chinese citizens are studying abroad under the program.The CSC said more than 98 percent of sponsored students and scholars have returned to China on time over the past five years, after they finished their study abroad.The program has become an important way for the country to foster talents in various fields, sources with the CSC said.

Uiversities offer free online courses

Top US universities have started offering free online courses and certificates, challenging the expensive on-campus way of studying and allowing international students to get US education straight from their computers.Universities including Stanford, Princeton and Columbia, are signing on with new online venture Coursera with classes varying from Finance through to Sociology and Statistics – all of the online classes are taught by the universities’ teachers.

The project is still to overcome some scepticism about the quality of online education as: doors are wide open for cheating,” said Michael Winckler mathematician at Heidelberg University.At the same time MIT, Harvard and University of California, and Berkeley are uniting and offering online courses under a non-profit venture called edX.Enrolling more students through MOOCs may cut costs by enabling universities to outsource coursework on the internet, while fewer students would need campus housing.However, instead of college credits, the students enrolled on the online classes receive certificates of completion, which do not lead to a degree.University of Washington is the first US school to provide credits using a MOOC learning platform – for a fee.Could this initiative change the face of the contemporary education? Anant Agarwal, president of edX called it “the single biggest change in education since the printing press.The enthusiasm about the free prestigious online courses is not in question. Over 1.7 million people have already signed up for Coursera.

Heep Yunn School sees 26 Form Five pupils drop out of its diploma course this year

As many as 13 per cent of the second batch of pupils taking the new secondary school diploma course at an elite school have left for overseas studies because some lacked confidence in the new curriculum, the school's headmaster said.Heep Yunn School principal Lee Chun-hung said 26 Form Five pupils had this year left the school to study overseas, leaving 167 pupils sitting for the Diploma of Secondary Education - introduced last year as part of the city's far-reaching education reforms.

In the first batch of diploma takers, only three pupils left for overseas studies.Other elite schools said there was no obvious trend in their schools of diploma students leaving to study abroad.But Lee said he expected the trend at Heep Yunn School, in Ma Tau Wai, Kowloon, to continue, noting that the number of pupils taking international examinations at the school was also increasing. More than 100 pupils took the International General Certificate of Secondary School and the General Certificate of Education last year, more than double that the year before.Some are not confident of taking the diploma, and plan to come back to Hong Kong and enter university through means other than the JUPAS, said Lee. "Not so many in the first batch went abroad, perhaps because they had less information.

But Nancy Chan Woo Mei-hou, principal of King's College in Western, drew a different picture.She said in her school, more than 10 Form Five pupils from the first batch who studied under the diploma curriculum went abroad, but fewer did so from among this year's Form Six pupils.Lee said 90 per cent of Heep Yunn School's pupils who sat the first diploma exams had entered undergraduate programmes, with most admitted to local universities through JUPAS. Many went to the University of Hong Kong, with the pupil who got the school's best diploma result doing a law degree at the university.Lee said the school would have to work harder on Chinese, as more than 10 per cent of its pupils failed to attain the lowest grade to enter local universities.The school - which has just become a direct-subsidy school, meaning it receives government funds but acts largely as a private school - admitted one pupil from the mainland last year. Lee expects more mainland pupils to approach the school amid a trend for mainland parents to seek places for their children in direct subsidy schools. The pupils face are subject to the same admissions criteria as local ones.

Graduate and post graduate courses

Campuses in the West have for long been attracting youth in India and Indoreans too are in the race. While studying in famous institutes of US is still a dream of many since past several years, better opportunities in Canada, Australia and New Zealand are attracting youth for the last couple of years. In the last five years, there is a rise of 200-250 students moving abroad.According to city-based experts, who cater to the need of students who wish to go abroad, availability of scholarship, work permit followed by citizenship are encouraging students to move to Canada, Australia,Austria and New Zealand. Nitin Goel, founder and director, Indian Institute of Careers and Higher Education (IICHE) said, Though most of the students still prefer US to study under graduate and post graduate courses, of late Canada followed by Australia and New Zealand are attracting students from the city."

He said that in last three years more number of students have started moving abroad for studying under graduate courses as there is consistent rise in number of students taking Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).However, going by the trend, it has come to fore that students have shelved their dream to study in UK because of costly education as well as stringent laws and unemployment. Overall number of students going abroad from city is almost consistent since past few years but UK has witnessed downward trend mainly due to strict laws and non-availability of jobs,said Goel.As per the estimated figures, nearly 1,200 to 1,500 students make beeline for institutes abroad every year. Approximately, 700-800 students go to US for higher studies including UG, PG and PhD courses while 200-250 students choose UK. Though UK is still the second favourite destination of students, number of students moving to Canada, Australia and New Zealand has seen a rise with 50, 70 and 40 students respectively moving to these countries.

According to a recent study conducted by one of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM), there has been a steady annual rise of 7% Indians travelling overseas for a degree. More than 53,000 Indians went abroad in 2000 and at the end of the decade, the count shot up to 1.9 lakh. Prashant Hemnani, founder and director of Globalizers, a coaching institute said, "There is 10-15% rise in number of students travelling abroad for higher education. Earlier, people used to worry about the cost of education but actually the cost is not high in comparison to the rewards that foreign education offers."

Free, high-quality online courses available

High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. Edward Hess, professor at the University of Virginia’s Dard­en School of Business, is teaching a “massive open online course starting in January on Coursera – the free online education platform founded this year by two Stanford University computer scientists. So far, more than 26,000 students have signed up.I usually teach 120 or 130 students a year, says Prof Hess. “Do you know how many years I would have to live before I could teach that many students?”High quality global journalism requires investment. His class, on how to help a private business grow, is among the first MBA-level moocs offered on Coursera. It is, he says, “an opportunity to help lots of people learn from each other and become more successful.Meanwhile, the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania began its first free online course on Coursera in August. The course, on gamification – the application of digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business  attracted 81,631 people, with 9,244 completing the course earlier this month. It will be run again soon.

The promise of Coursera and platforms like it – including edX, a joint online education partnership run by Harvard and MIT, and Udacity another Stanford start-up that offers moocs in computer Science ,software design and Software Engineering– has been lauded by the higher education community. By bringing high-quality college and graduate-level moocs to a wider audience, these platforms could help provide life-long learning opportunities. High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. These platforms also have a potentially dramatic impact on business education: not only in the way schools deliver a traditional management degree, but also because moocs may in time become direct competitors to schools’ specialised programmes. As these platforms try to make money, they could offer executive education, custom programmes for employers and other programmes for MBAs – courses that have typically been very lucrative for schools.

If business schools want to continue to make good money with standard off-the-shelf open programmes they [had] better learn to deliver them online, says David Bach, senior associate dean for executive MBA and global programmes at Yale School of Management. Managers’ time away from the office has become the main training cost firms try to minimise, and with Coursera and others that cost can now be zero, he adds.Several schools have attempted on­line education in the past without much success. In 2003, Fathom, Columbia University’s for-profit on­line learning platform, closed just a few years after launch, while AllLearn, a venture backed by Princeton, Yale and Stanford, lasted three years.But this new breed of web-based systems is different, says Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera. “We are at an inflection point,” she adds.

Prof Koller says that technological advances, including the improved quality of cloud computing, the reduced cost of streaming video and the capacity to create user-friendly custom content, have made it easier and less expensive to deliver courses online. “And on the sociological side, there is a generation of students that has grown up utilising technology for education and social interaction. This is natural for them,” she adds.Business schools have long emphasised classroom debate as a learning tool, but many classes are still taught by lectures. The arrival of Coursera, edX and Udacity may change that.Both Udacity and edX recently an­nounced aagreements with Pearson Vue, a provider of testing services, giving students the option of taking a final, proctored (certified) exam. Pearson Vue is owned by Pearson, which owns the Financial Times.These new platforms could essentially “flip” the classroom: rather than going to class and sitting through long lectures, students will watch them in their own time as homework. This will allow them to rewind parts of the lecture and go over material they find more challenging. It also frees up class time for group discussion or experiential learning. Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, the free online education platform, is the pioneer of this model.

This development could help level the playing field between top business schools with large endowments and those with fewer resources, Prof Kol­ler adds. “The flipped classroom creates more time for relationship-building. It allows those smaller colleges [and business schools] to do what they do better than anyone else and that is to get to know their students; to see what their needs are and to help them along.Jeffrey Katzman, chief learning of­ficer at Colorado-based Xyleme, which sells education tools to universities, says the new platforms recruit “superstar” teachers. “They put a very high production value on these courses and they’re investing a lot of money into the curriculum.The rise of these platforms also poses competition to lower-tier programmes, which will have difficulty justifying their prices in the face of free online courses from top schools. A recent report by Moody’s, the credit rating agency, warned that the platforms also posed a threat to for-profit universities.

Outside the traditional MBA, these platforms could alter the way business schools deliver specialised courses for employers and working professionals. Such programmes are considered cash cows. But as Coursera, edX and Udacity add more business courses, moocs present companies with an ap­pealing and cost-effective alternative.Executive education may evolve from a residential model to a desktop one, says Anant Agarwal, president of edX and a professor of computer science and engineering at MIT.Online learning is a useful technology for executives,” he says. “When you have a job, it’s difficult to get away for a week or two weeks. But if you had the opportunity to do a class at night or weekends on your computer, it opens up a whole new world. It becomes much more attractive and much more convenient.Prof Agarwal says that charging companies for these classes is one way to monetise edX, which is a non-profit but needs to be self-sustaining in future.The campus experience is a unique experience and a very valuable one, he says. But online learning is a rising tide that lifts all boats.”