Higher education contributing to local, national, and global development: new empirical and conceptual insights

Abstract

Higher education offers the potential to support glonacal (global, national, and local) development. This study presents new empirical and conceptual insights into the ways in which higher education can help to achieve and exceed the outcomes enshrined in the Sustainable Development Goals. Open-ended online surveys were used to learn how academics in Georgia and Kazakhstan view the contributions of universities to addressing self-identified development challenges; and how universities work with the government and the private sector for realising their glonacal development potential. While the study provides ample evidence on the national manifestations of the developmental role of universities, it also shows that limited academic freedom and institutional autonomy impede the full realisation of the potential of higher education. The assumptions underpinning the academics’ views on how higher education can support development are discussed in the light of an innovative framework of essentialist and anti-essentialist approaches. Juxtaposing the national with the global development missions of universities, the paper raises questions on the possibility of delinking higher education from the immediate human capital and modernisation needs of the nation-state and becoming concerned with the global, on promoting freedom to cultivate intellectual curiosity through education and research, and stimulating a more holistic imaginary of the developmental purposes of higher education.

Online technology: Sustainable higher education or diploma disease for emerging society during emergency—comparison between pre and during COVID-19

“…Production processes and sensitive delivery are the key to a quality product and this requires dealing with people, while online technological methods make act simply as a process management tool. The product of education remains an ambiguous entity, for example Unterhalter and Howell (2021) argued that graduates are the products of the education system, while Chankselian et al. (2021) explained that knowledge and skills are the products.…”

Utilization of E-learning by Agricultural Students of Public Higher Institutions in Southwest of Nigeria

“…In accordance with the rating of low and high, as indication of level of awareness of available e-learning facilities, the respondents' scores in level of awareness as shown in Table 2, range 1-22 with a mean of 10.9. To find the level of awareness of available e-learning facilities, the scores were grouped into two categories; low (0-11) and high (12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22). The analysis revealed that level of awareness of available e-learning facilities by the respondents, with a majority (71.0%) claiming to be as low, while 29.0% indicated that the level of awareness of available elearning facilities is high.…”

The New Progression Model of Entrepreneurial Education—Guideline for the Development of an Entrepreneurial University with a Sustainability Approach

“…The paradigm of higher education is shifting from the traditional towards an entrepreneurial university, giving different meanings of this term [1][2][3][4]. As the role of academic institutions in stimulating, therefore contributing to, the development of the modern knowledge-based economy has become widely accepted [5], the entrepreneurial university concept in practice has been facilitated by the collaboration between universities, government entities, and industrial partners, as outlined by a triple helix model [6]. So far, the main research has been focused on industry-university relations with respect to technology transfer [7] or university-business cooperation [8].…”