A desire to produce well-rounded graduates. An influx of Chinese students. Heartburn over university rankings. Such universal topics were among the subjects of discussion at the annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Association for International Education, which wrapped up here on Thursday.
Several university presidents and vice chancellors from Asia lamented an overemphasis in higher education on graduates’ employability. There is too great a focus, they agreed, on imparting a narrow set of skills rather than on educating students broadly. Are modern universities, asked Inwon Choue, president of Kyung Hee University, in Seoul, “begetting academic excellence without soul?”
Flora Chia-I Chang, president of Tamkang University, a private institution in Taiwan, said that while professional preparation is important, so too are the liberal arts and extracurricular activities. At Tamkang, students are required to participate in at least one club, she said.
“Many universities emphasize professional education and forget character cultivation,” Ms. Chang said. “We want to prepare students to work professionally and live soundly.”
But Gordon W.H. Cheung, the association’s departing president and an associate vice president at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said universities in Asia often focused less on the arts and humanities because they felt pressure to concentrate on the sciences. That’s because global university rankings include measures of scientific research in their calculations. In a region where institutions’ performance is a matter of national pride, university are acutely aware of the rankings.
At the same time, international rankings seem inherently stacked against institutions in Asia. With a few notable exceptions, universities here are less wealthy than their counterparts in Europe and North America, and thus less able to invest in top academics and research. And for most, their faculty members’ native language is not English. The major global rankings consider faculty publications and citations in major international academic journals, all of which are in English.
“English is a hardship which we cannot overcome,” said Yong-goo Lee, president of South Korea’s Chung-Ang University. Some papers written by his faculty members, he said, have “good content but poor English,” and thus are not accepted by international journals.
Mr. Lee said his professors also struggled to teach in English. About 30 percent of his institution’s courses are taught in English, partly to attract foreign students.
Right now, the bulk of Chung-Ang’s international students are from China, he said, noting that Chinese students make up a large share of the foreign enrollments on many Asian university campuses. “China,” he said, “is a big giant in all of our universities.”
Chinese universities, however, were not especially well represented at the conference. The three-day meeting drew some 1,300 participants from Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America, with Japan, South Korea, and the United States especially well represented.
Next year, however, the Chinese presence is expected to be greater: The conference will be held in Beijing.
Homegrown MOOCs
Like their counterparts in the United States, Asian higher-education leaders are wrestling with new developments in online learning.
Major providers of massive open online courses, like Coursera and edX, have recently made inroads into the Chinese market.
But could a homegrown MOOC catch on? Wei-I Lee, a professor at National Chiao Tung University, in Taiwan, and a founder of ewant, a MOOC started by a consortium of Taiwanese and mainland Chinese universities, believes so.
“There are localized services that I think an international platform can’t offer,” Mr. Lee said during a session on online learning at the conference.
Started last fall by National Chiao Tung University and four Chinese partner institutions, ewant has thus far offered seven courses, in subjects including statistics, computer programming, and Chinese medicine, and enrolled about 10,000 students. In its next phase, Mr. Lee plans to add 10 to 15 partners, including several “985" universities, China’s most elite. About 50 courses will be available.
So far, most MOOCs have not been offered for credit. But Mr. Lee, who also started the first open-courseware website in Taiwan, thinks there is a desire in the region for for-credit online courses, particularly among companies seeking training for their employees. Few options for on-the-job training and professional development exist in China and Taiwan, he said.
Although the courses will be free, ewant will charge companies for specialized “add-ons.” Students will also pay a small fee to take a proctored examination. While many of the major MOOC providers use online webcams and specialized software to monitor students taking tests, such methods engender little trust in China and Taiwan, where exam fraud is common, Mr. Lee said.