Kenya: NCIC, KFCB sensitize university students on political intolerance

Africa/Kenya/26-02-2021/Authors: Hunja Macharia / Haniel Mengistu/Source: www.kbc.co.ke

The National Cohesion and Integration Commission has embarked on a sensitization programe for university students to curb rising political temperatures.

NCIC in partnership with Kenya film classification board KFCB sensitized university students on National values and peace to enhance good values and governance among the youth at the grassroots.

Speaking in Mombasa during a training on countering electoral Violence and political intolerance, NCIC Deputy Director of communication Olive Metet urged university leaders to promote peace in the country.

“We are sensitizing them on their role as university student’s leaders to go and preach the gospel of political tolerance to their comrades now that the youth are being used by politicians to cause chaos.” She said.

About 70 students from 24 universities were taken through the sensitization workshop held at the Kenya School of Government in Mombasa.

Jennifer Mukami Mbogo, Multimedia University students union president lauded the move terming it as an eye opener for university students.

“We are calling on positive use of social media during this political season instead of using it as a tool to propagate hatred. As youths we should be mature enough to ensure peace prevails and that the youth are not victims of political chaos,” Mukami said.

KFCB Executive Director Ezekiel Mutua said it is important to involve the youth in peace building for sustainable moral values in the society.

Mutua now wants University student leaders to be involved in national policy formulations saying they should be part of nation development.

“University student leaders play a critical role in shaping the society, student leaders should be involved in key policy formulations so that they can shape the future of youth leadership,” Mutua said.

University students leaders present were from Kenyatta University, Multimedia University, Moi University, Technical university of Mombasa, Nairobi University among other public and private universities in the country.

Source and Image: https://www.kbc.co.ke/ncic-kfcb-sensitize-university-students-on-political-intolerance/

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Universities raise alarm over no-deal Brexit and EU student enrolment

By: Sally Weale. 

University leaders have said that a no-deal Brexit would constitute “one of the biggest threats” ever faced by the sector, as figures revealed a further decline in EU student enrolment, particularly in postgraduate research.

According to the Russell Group of universities, there was a 9% decrease in the number of EU postgraduate research students enrolling at its institutions this academic year. The fall follows a 9% decline the previous year, and has potential consequences for Britain’s research capacity.

Dr Hollie Chandler, a senior policy analyst at the 24-strong group of leading universities, described the decline as “troubling” and said that were the UK to leave the EU without a deal, it would only increase uncertainty among prospective students from the rest of Europe.

Overall, the number of EU students who enrolled for the 2018-19 academic year at Russell Group universities fell by 3%. Last year, there was a 1% increase in overall EU student numbers, after years of healthy growth in recruitment.

Although enrolment of EU27 citizens at undergraduate level grew by 1% this year, at taught postgraduate level it fell by 5%.

The figures come as an open letter from leaders of 150 universities to MPs said the impact of a no-deal Brexit could lead to “an academic, cultural and scientific setback from which it would take decades to recover”.

“University leaders are united in the view that the UK leaving the EU without a deal is one of the biggest threats our universities have ever faced,” the letter says. “As a sector which contributes over £21bn to UK GDP every year and supports 944,000 jobs, it is critical to the national interest, to the economy, communities and wider society, that the UK’s universities thrive post-Brexit.

“To do so, our government must demonstrate the required ambition, put the right measures and guarantees in place, and, crucially, avoid the UK crashing out of the EU without a deal on 29 March.”

University leaders are particularly anxious to secure a guarantee from ministers that research funding for which the UK may become ineligible after Brexit will be replaced. Funding from the European Research Council (ERC) and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme (MSCA) will be worth an estimated €1.3bn (£1.2bn) to the UK over the next two years, investing in projects to fight cancer and combat climate change.

Dame Janet Beer, the president of Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, said time was running out.

“While we welcome the assurances that the government has already provided about the continuation of Horizon 2020 funding in a no deal scenario, it is critical that similar guarantees are extended, without delay, to cover ERC and MSCA funding,” said Beer, who is vice-chancellor of the University of Liverpool.

“Without cast-iron assurances, world-leading academics and researchers may leave for countries where access to ERC funding is not at risk, and those currently considering relocating to the UK may think again.”

Dame Nancy Rothwell, the vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester, said vital research projects at her university risked being disrupted, including work on proton-beam therapy for cancer patients and Nobel-prize winning work on graphene.

“Researchers who have already spent months or even years preparing funding bids would be left high and dry, including those whose application would be stuck in the middle of the evaluation process,” she said.

Commenting on the EU student enrolment figures, Chandler said that although the Russell Group universities remained popular study destinations with strong global appeal, the figures cannot be ignored.

“It’s fair to assume that uncertainty over Brexit and the UK’s future relationship with Europe could be a significant factor. The drop in postgraduate research courses is especially troubling – these students contribute directly to the UK’s research capacity,” she said.

“If we leave the EU without a deal, the uncertainty felt by prospective European students will only get worse.”

A UK Government spokesperson said: “Science recognises no borders and the UK has a proud record of welcoming the world’s leading scientists and researchers to work and study here. This will not change when we leave the EU.

“Through our modern Industrial Strategy we are investing the highest ever level in research and development in UK history and we are committed to seeking an ambitious future relationship on science and innovation with our EU partners. We are also guaranteeing, in the event of a no deal, money for EU programme-funded research and innovation projects agreed before the end of 2020.”

Shadow Higher and Further Education Minister Gordon Marsden added: “Despite consistent warnings from Labour and the University sector, the Government has continued to ignore the impending damage, especially the drift to no deal, Brexit could cause to our world class Universities and FE Colleges.

“Today’s letter from the sector reiterated everything we have been saying over the past two years about the threats facing students, staff and research but DfE and the Education Secretary has been abysmally negligent in ensuring those concerns and a deal on them should be put at the top of the negotiations table.”

Source of the article: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jan/04/universities-raise-alarm-over-no-deal-brexit-and-eu-student-enrolment

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THE Asia-Pacific University Rankings 2018: methodology

By The Times Higher Education

The Asia-Pacific University Rankings are built on the results of Times Higher Education’s extensive data collection, analysed with the same methods used for the World University Rankings and adjusted to reflect regional priorities

Browse the full Times Higher Education Asia-Pacific University Rankings 2018 results

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings are the only global performance tables that judge research-intensive universities across all their core missions: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook. The Asia-Pacific University Rankings use the same 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons, trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments. However, the weightings are specially recalibrated to reflect the priorities of Asia-Pacific institutions.

The performance indicators are grouped into five areas: Teaching (the learning environment); Research (volume, income and reputation); citations (research influence); International outlook (staff, students and research); and industry income (knowledge transfer).

Exclusions

Universities are excluded from the World University Rankings if they do not teach undergraduates or if their research output amounted to fewer than 1,000 articles between 2012 and 2016 (and a minimum of 150 a year). Universities can also be excluded if 80 per cent or more of their activity is exclusively in one of our 11 subject areas.

Data collection

Institutions provide and sign off their institutional data for use in the rankings. On the rare occasions when a particular data point is not provided, we enter a conservative estimate for the affected metric. By doing this, we avoid penalising an institution too harshly with a “zero” value for data that it overlooks or does not provide, but we do not reward it for withholding them.

Getting to the final result

Moving from a series of specific data points to indicators, and finally to a total score for an institution, requires us to match values that represent fundamentally different data. To do this we use a standardisation approach for each indicator, and then combine the indicators in the proportions indicated to the right.

The standardisation approach we use is based on the distribution of data within a particular indicator, where we calculate a cumulative probability function, and evaluate where a particular institution’s indicator sits within that function. A cumulative probability score of X in essence tells us that a university with random values for that indicator would fall below that score X per cent of the time.

For all indicators except for the Academic Reputation Survey we calculate the cumulative distribution function of a normal distribution using Z-scoring. For the data in the Academic Reputation Survey we use the cumulative distribution function of an exponential distribution in our calculations.



Teaching (the learning environment): 25%

The most recent Academic Reputation Survey (run annually) that underpins this category was carried out in January to March 2017, attracting 10,568 responses. It examined the perceived prestige of institutions in teaching. The responses were statistically representative of the global academy’s geographical and subject mix. The 2017 data are combined with the results of the 2016 survey, giving more than 20,000 responses.

As well as giving a sense of how committed an institution is to nurturing the next generation of academics, a high proportion of postgraduate research students also suggests the provision of teaching at the highest level that is thus attractive to graduates and effective at developing them. This indicator is normalised to take account of a university’s unique subject mix, reflecting that the volume of doctoral awards varies by discipline.

Institutional income is scaled against academic staff numbers and normalised for purchasing-power parity. It indicates an institution’s general status and gives a broad sense of the infrastructure and facilities available to students and staff.

Research (volume, income and reputation): 30%

The most prominent indicator in this category looks at a university’s reputation for research excellence among its peers, based on the responses to our annual Academic Reputation Survey (see left).

Research income is scaled against academic staff numbers and adjusted for purchasing-power parity (PPP). This is a controversial indicator because it can be influenced by national policy and economic circumstances. But income is crucial to the development of world-class research, and because much of it is subject to competition and judged by peer review, our experts suggested that it was a valid measure. This indicator is fully normalised to take account of each university’s distinct subject profile, reflecting the fact that research grants in science subjects are often bigger than those awarded for the highest-quality social science, arts and humanities research.

To measure productivity we count the number of papers published in the academic journals indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database per scholar, scaled for institutional size and normalised for subject. This gives a sense of the university’s ability to get papers published in quality peer-reviewed journals. This year, we devised a method to give credit for papers that are published in subjects where a university declares no staff.


 

Citations (research influence): 30%

Our research influence indicator looks at universities’ role in spreading new knowledge and ideas.

We examine research influence by capturing the average number of times a university’s published work is cited by scholars globally. This year, our bibliometric data supplier Elsevier examined almost 62 million citations to more than 12.4 million journal articles, article reviews, conference proceedings and books and book chapters published over five years. The data include the 23,000 academic journals indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database and all indexed publications between 2012 and 2016. Citations to these publications made in the six years from 2012 to 2017 are also collected.

The citations help to show us how much each university is contributing to the sum of human knowledge: they tell us whose research has stood out, has been picked up and built on by other scholars and, most importantly, has been shared around the global scholarly community to expand the boundaries of our understanding, irrespective of discipline.

The data are normalised by the overall number of papers produced to reflect variations in citation volume between different subject areas. This means that large institutions or those with high levels of research activity in subjects with traditionally high citation counts do not gain an unfair advantage.

We have blended equal measures of a country-adjusted and non-country-adjusted raw measure of citations scores.

In 2015-16, we excluded papers with more than 1,000 authors because they were having a disproportionate impact on the citation scores of a small number of universities. Since last year, we have designed a method for reincorporating these papers. Working with Elsevier, we have developed a new fractional counting approach that ensures that all universities where academics are authors of these papers will receive at least 5 per cent of the value of the paper, and where those that provide the most contributors to the paper receive a proportionately larger contribution.

International outlook (staff, students, research): 7.5%

The ability of a university to attract undergraduates, postgraduates and faculty from all over the planet is key to its success on the world stage.

In the third international indicator, we calculate the proportion of a university’s total research journal publications that have at least one international co-author and reward higher volumes. This indicator is normalised to account for a university’s subject mix and uses the same five-year window as the “Citations: research influence” category.

Industry income (knowledge transfer): 7.5%

A university’s ability to help industry with innovations, inventions and consultancy has become a core mission of the contemporary global academy. This category seeks to capture such knowledge-transfer activity by looking at how much research income an institution earns from industry (adjusted for PPP), scaled against the number of academic staff it employs.

The category suggests the extent to which businesses are willing to pay for research and a university’s ability to attract funding in the commercial marketplace – useful indicators of institutional quality.

Source of the article: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/asia-pacific-university-rankings-2018-methodology#survey-answer
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