14:00 - 14:20
1.D.1. Quality Assurance as a Tool for Partnership in Higher Education
Sven Caspersen
Denmark

Over the last 15 to 20 years, Europe has focused on mobility and partnership between the European universities. The idea of creating the European higher education area was further promoted through the Bologna Process which was launched in 1999. Quality assurance (QA), accreditation and benchmarking have been core elements in this process. The European register - based on the IAUP World Quality Register (WQR) concept - is now under implementation, with the intention of creating a trustworthy and transparent European QA Accreditation system. This paper will provide a short overview of the present development in the Bologna process and will describe the impact on European university partnerships, illustrated
through the European Consortium of Innovative Universities (ECIU).

 

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14:20 - 14:40
1.D.2. Reconstructing General Education for a Sustainable Future: "Galaxy of Learning" Project
Shinnosuke Tama
Iwate University, Japan

Higher education institutions bear the responsibility of developing leaders for our future society. Therefore, universities should take the lead for promoting the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD), launched by the United Nations in 2005. Iwate University began its institutional commitment to the UN DESD by embedding sustainable development concepts in all general education subjects, in order to restructure general education into an education programme for nurturing 21st-century citizens.

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14:40 - 15:00
1.D.3. Quest for a New Kind of Liberal Arts and Science Education
David Strangway
Chancellor, Quest University, Canada

This paper introduces Quest University, a new university in Canada that opened its doors to its first students in September 2007. This new university has been created to serve students of the 21st century and goes beyond the boundaries of academic disciplines and geographic borders in the pursuit of knowledge and global understanding. It is a small university and operates on the block plan, which creates a very different and intense learning environment. Students must be active participants in this model which is a seminar or tutorial dialogue between students and the faculty member and between students. In the first two years, students will take a predetermined array of 16 required courses to give them a good background in physical sciences, life sciences, social sciences and humanities. In each course they will be exposed to the ideas in the various fields but the courses will not be a survey of each detailed discipline. For example, in the science courses there will be attention paid to the frontiers of the fields of study so they can become acquainted with the excitement of what is happening in today's world and how science is changing the way we live and understand and communicate with each other. This base prepares them for the next two years. In these two years the student will select an important and interesting topic of study. Given that today's important problems do not relate to highly specialized fields and will typically cross many boundaries, the topic chosen may or may not correspond to a single discipline. This topic will be pursued in depth using both the classroom and the opportunity for experiential learning in a setting outside the campus and perhaps outside the country. The goal here is to break down the silos of typical academic programs.

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15:00 - 15:20
1.D.4. The Possibilities and Challenges of Promoting Education for Sustainable Development in Asia in the Future
Pornchai Mongkhonvanit
President, Siam University, Thailand

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