Search

As humanity reaches the 5.0 industrial revolution, education plays a critical role in boosting the quality of human resources. This paper reports bibliometric research on emerging TiP during 1993-2022 in the educational field to analyse its development on any level of education during the last three decades. This study employed a Scopus database. The findings are that the trend of TiP publication in educational fields has tended to increase every year during the past three decades and conference paper became the most published document type, the USA is the country which produces the most publications; "Students" being the most occurrences keyword and total link strength. The publication of the TiP is ranked to the Quartile 1, which implies that a publication with the cited performance is a publication with credibility because the publisher has a good reputation. Researchers can find the topics most relevant to other metadata sources such as Web of Science, Publish, and Perish.

The aim of this study is to identify the most prolific countries in the field of special education and to discuss the widespread impact of their papers by taking into account the country's h-index. Through a bibliometric analysis, the data were collected in the Web of Science Core Collection category "Education, Special" in the Social Science Citation Index during 2011-2020. The 25 most prolific countries in the field of special education were determined in terms of paper productivity, and it was seen that the leading country was undisputedly the USA (54.42%). Meanwhile, a strong positive correlation was found between the h-index and the number of papers published by the countries (r=0.864). On the other hand, when the ranking in terms of the number of papers was reconfigured by the h-index, it was relatively changed. The possible reasons for this change for the countries with the most changing rankings were discussed by considering some definitive criteria such as the journal quartiles, the percentage of international and domestic, and the percentage of open access papers. This study reports a positive correlation between the quality and quantity in the field of special education for the publications of countries. It has been shown that where the positive correlation deviates, then especially, the journal quartiles, the percentage of international collaboration and the percentage of open access papers have a significant effect. The bibliometric findings may be useful to enrich the discussion about the widespread impact of papers and debate whether the use of h-index is acceptable for cross-national comparisons.

The higher education efficiency evaluation model using the data envelopment analysis method has interested many researchers. This paper uses bibliometric analysis on publications extracted from the Scopus database to provide a comprehensive overview of research publications on the measurement of higher education efficiency based on data envelopment analysis: its growth rate, major collaboration networks, the most important and popular research topic. A total of 169 related publications were collected and analyzed from 1988 to 2021. The analysis results show that: Publications published every year have increased sharply in the last six years; The quality of publications is relatively high as publications tend to be published in journals with high-ranking indexes; Countries with the most influence in studies on this topic are: Italy, China, Spain, the USA, and the United Kingdom; Authors with the most influence in this research direction are Agasisti T., Abbott M., Doucouliagos C., Avkiran N.K., and Johnes J.; The research cooperation among countries and among affiliations is not strong. Finally, the paper has provided recommendations for future studies based on the findings.

Although concepts such as research without borders have become more commonplace in recent decades, few studies have investigated the capabilities that global researchers require to cross both cultural and disciplinary borders. This paper explores global capabilities along with strategies and spaces that may facilitate academic researchers' acquisition and development of global research competence. The study's dataset comprises responses of 26 participants across 15 countries -- all of whom are members of a specific comparative education society -- who contributed their views via e-questionnaire. Findings indicate that research capacity building is a dynamic process and global competence calls for complex skills and conscious attitudes. Commitment to expand scientific curiosity beyond one's own culture and academic discipline appears to be a main criterion in achieving global competence. Results of this study are not meant to be prescriptive but rather exploratory and informative for a broad group of academic stakeholders.

While ChatGPT has recently become very popular, AI has a long history and philosophy. This paper intends to explore the promises and pitfalls of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) AI and potentially future technologies by adopting a speculative methodology. Speculative future narratives with a specific focus on educational contexts are provided in an attempt to identify emerging themes and discuss their implications for education in the 21st century. Affordances of (using) AI in Education (AIEd) and possible adverse effects are identified and discussed which emerge from the narratives. It is argued that now is the best of times to define human vs AI contribution to education because AI can accomplish more and more educational activities that used to be the prerogative of human educators. Therefore, it is imperative to rethink the respective roles of technology and human educators in education with a future-oriented mindset.

In this work, a bibliometric analysis of the investigations of the last 54 years focused on the teaching of topology and its applications in the learning of other areas of knowledge was carried out. The articles that appear in the SCOPUS database were taken into account under the search criteria of the words topology and teaching, connected with the Boolean expression AND in the search field ABS. As a result, 329 articles were obtained which, based on the PRISMA methodology, were reduced to 74 papers. In them publication trends, impact of publications, citation frequencies, among others, were compared. In addition, its use was identified for learning topology at different levels of training, areas of knowledge where this discipline is most applied and strategies used to teach these applications.

This rapid systematic review aims to examine emerging evidence on the effects of COVID-19 on educational institutions and assess the prevalence of e-learning changes in the sector. This paper reviews literature on learning, teaching, and assessment approaches adopted since the COVID-19 outbreak, and assesses the impact on the sector, staff, and students, summarizing findings from peer-reviewed articles. It categorizes these into five key themes: (1) digital learning; (2) e-learning challenges; (3) digital transition to emergency virtual assessment (EVA); (4) psychological impact of COVID-19; and (5) creating collaborative cultures. This represents the first systematic review of COVID-19's impact on education, clarifying current themes being investigated. The author suggests that the term 'emergency virtual assessment' (EVA) is now added for future research discussion. Finally, the paper identifies research gaps, including researching the impact on lesser developed countries, the psychological impact of transition, and the important role of leadership and leadership styles during the transition and handling of the pandemic.

This paper presents a compilation of personal reflections from 66 contributors on the impact of, and responses to, COVID-19 in accounting education in 45 different countries around the world. It reveals a commonality of issues, and a variability in responses, many positive outcomes, including the creation of opportunities to realign learning and teaching strategies away from the comfort of traditional formats, but many more that are negative, primarily relating to the impact on faculty and student health and well-being, and the accompanying stress. It identifies issues that need to be addressed in the recovery and redesign stages of the management of this crisis, and it sets a new research agenda for studies in accounting education.

Objective: Schools are important settings for health promotion. In schools, children and adolescents can be reached regardless of their social background, which represents a unique opportunity for promoting health. Several studies have demonstrated the importance of school leadership in initiating and sustaining health promotion; however, efforts to systematically review the influence of school leadership on school health promotion are still lacking. Hence, this paper analyses empirical studies published in scientific journals on school leadership and health promotion in schools. Design: Systematic literature review. Method: Informed by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis guidelines, a review was conducted using two main databases: Web of Science and Scopus, which retrieved 51 eligible articles. Results: The review of these articles resulted in the identification of seven main themes -- school leaders' health; attitudes, knowledge and behaviour; accountability; support from school leaders; shared leadership approaches; capacity building and parent engagement. Conclusion: This systematic literature review expands the literature by highlighting the school leadership factors that promote school health promotion in Oceania, Europe, North America, South America, Africa and Asia continents. Future systematic literature reviews could explore studies and different aspects of health promotion by teachers, especially in the Asian context.

The aim of this study was to determine the examination of the researches about the use of technology by fine arts teachers. The study was conducted according to the content and citation analysis model. In this context, Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection indexes were included. In the document scanning in the WOS environment, the keywords 'Fine arts', 'Teachers' and 'Technology' were searched. In total, 169 documents were examined and analysed one by one. They were analysed according to year, document type, WOS content category, country, source title, organisation and citation, authors, publication language and categories. As a result of this research, the first study was conducted in 2004, while the most studies were conducted in 2016. It was concluded that the published studies had the most Proceedings papers as the document type. The area where the studies of fine arts teachers on the use of technology are mostly carried out is Education Educational Research, according to the Web of Science content category. The most researched title in the distribution according to the Source Title field is 'International Multidisciplinary Scientific Conferences on Social Sciences and Arts.' The university with the most studies is Kazan Federal University. The 19 authors who conducted the studies have a large number of studies in this field. It was concluded that other authors had only one study in the field. Again, when we look at the distribution of the countries and documents according to the language of writing, the country with the most studies is China and the language of the documents is English. The area continues to evolve.

Recently, there has been growing educational interest in competency. Global organizations, such as the United Nations (UN) and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which are leading the discourse on education reform, are undertaking the lead in spreading awareness regarding competency education. Since 2015, the number of published articles on competency education has been rapidly increasing. This paper aims to provide significant implications for creating a sustainable future of competency education. A topic modeling method was used to empirically analyze latent topics and international research trends in 26,532 articles published on competency-based education (CBE). As a result of the analysis, 15 topics were derived, including "approach to competency development." In addition, five topics including "learning skills" and "teacher training" were found to be hot topics with the increasing article publication. The rapidly changing modern society is calling for a transformation in education. We hope that the results of this study paves the way for further research exploring new directions for education, such as competency education.

Seamless learning has a significance that has been increasing in recent years, and an increasing number of studies on the subject in the literature draws attention. This study aimed to examine the research on seamless learning between 1996 and 2020 with the bibliometric analysis method. The Scopus database was used in the collection of the data. After various screening processes, a total of 389 publications were included in the analysis. Descriptive analysis and bibliometric analysis were used in the analysis of the data. The distribution of publications by years, types of publications, sources, and languages were analyzed in the research. Additionally, visual maps were created with analyses of co-author, cocitation, and co-word. At the end of the study, it was seen that there has been an increase in the number of publications from the past to the present, articles and papers were predominant, and that most of the studies were carried out in English. As a result of bibliometric analysis, it was concluded that the most efficient countries in seamless learning were the United Kingdom, the United States, and Singapore. Also, it has been determined that the National Institute of Education, Center for International Education and Exchange, and Kyushu University institutions are dominant. The most frequently mentioned authors cited in studies in many different fields are M. Sharples, L.-H. Wong, and H. Ogata. According to the co-word analysis, the keywords seamless learning, mobile learning, ubiquitous learning, and mobile-assisted language learning stand out in the field of seamless learning.

While infusion of technology into schools has been one of the top priorities of the education reform agenda across the world, findings from many large-scale international assessments indicate that students' use of information and communication technology (ICT) has mixed effects on their academic achievements. In this paper, we argue that these ambivalent findings were due to the oversight of the indirect effects of ICT use mediated by other ICT-related variables. We employed multilevel structural equation modelling to unfold the relationship between students' ICT use and their academic achievements based on PISA 2015 data. The results indicated that students' autonomy in ICT use and students' interest in ICT use were found to have significant positive direct effects on students' academic achievements at both within-school and between-school levels. These two variables played a significant role in mediating the indirect effects of ICT use outside school for schoolwork and ICT resources on students' academic achievements. On the contrary, ICT resources and ICT use at school exerted either no direct effect or a negative direct effect on students' academic achievements and students' perceived autonomy related to ICT use, suggesting that mere provision and use of ICT resources in school did not necessarily guarantee success in student performance. At the school level, school's transformational leadership and collaborative climate helped promote students' autonomy in ICT use.

This article maps the scientific production and the contents associated with the sustainable development goals and their integration with universities during the past 21 years. Although many of the topics related to sustainable development goals (SDGs) have been addressed in different studies for decades, it is since 2015 onwards that they gained greater prominence due to the inclusion of higher education as an important actor in the fulfillment of the 2030 agenda and the United Nations SDGs. For the purpose of this paper, a bibliometric analysis of 871 papers, 535 documents in Scopus, and 336 in Web of Science (WoS) from 1998 to 2019 was performed, and the Bibliometrix analysis tool was used. The objective of this mapping is to answer the following research question: Is the integration of the Sustainable Development Goals and Universities a field of study? An analysis of the network of collaborators and trend topics in Scopus and WoS allows us to identify the concurrence and relationships of some keywords, such as sustainable development, sustainability and planning, and some background words, such as humans and global health. In another analysis, the word "higher education" is related to change. This article suggests that the integration of the Sustainable Development Goals in Universities is becoming a field of study under exploration, with a peak of production in 2016 and that has remained stable in the last three years, but thanks to the leading role assigned to Universities, intellectual production should increase in the following years.

In this study, the variables having impact on the student motivation have been analyzed based on the articles, conference papers, master's theses and doctoral dissertations published in the years 2000-2017. A total of 165 research papers were selected for the research material and the data were collected through qualitative research techniques through document review and content analysis. According to the research results, the most important factors affecting student motivation are the fields of teacher, teachers' classroom management skills and their teaching methods. In this research, factors having less influence on the student motivation are parental communication, student characteristics and study fields. In addition, relational search type was used more than others, mostly students were selected as the study group and most researches were conducted in USA and Turkey.

This paper reports on the first stage of an international comparative study for the project "'Digital educational architectures: Open learning resources in distributed learning infrastructures--EduArc,'" funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. This study reviews the situation of digital educational resources (or (O)ER) framed within the digital transformation of ten different Higher Education (HE) systems (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Turkey and the United States). Following a comparative case study approach, we investigated issues related to the existence of policies, quality assurance mechanisms and measures for the promotion of change in supporting infrastructure development for (O)ER at the national level in HE in the different countries. The results of this mainly documentary research highlight differences and similarities, which are largely due to variations in these countries' political structure organisation. The discussion and conclusion point at the importance of understanding each country's context and culture, in order to understand the differences between them, as well as the challenges they face.

This paper reports preliminary findings on students enrolled in a massive open online course, who were also assigned to work in groups. Part of a larger study on the effect of groups on retention and completion in MOOCs, the paper provides students' demographics (i.e., location, gender, education level, and employment status), and motivation for taking the course. Findings show that women outnumbered men and that students mostly enrolled into the course because of a friend. Indeed, research on MOOCs demonstrates that men outnumber women and that educational pursuit and professional development are the main motivators for taking MOOCs. Yet, this paper shows that when group work is included in a MOOC, women participate more. Furthermore, for students assigned to groups in a MOOC, friends are the principal incentive for enrolling into the course. These results are discussed in light of previous research, and implications for teaching and learning in online environments addressed.

Teacher noticing can be an important element in improving teaching and students' mathematical success. While the focus of the international project "Learning from Lessons" was on teacher learning, in this paper we report what mathematics teachers noticed and claimed to learn through the process of planning, teaching, and reflecting on their lessons. The study involved teachers and research teams from three countries (Australia, China and Germany) with different cultures, contexts and pedagogies. The explicit goal of the current study was to identify commonalities and differences with respect to those aspects that teachers noticed during their teaching. A multiple case study with three teachers, one from each of the three participating countries, was conducted using prompting questions to facilitate teacher reflection. The process of defining and refining categories for teacher noticing was implemented in the methodology. The findings suggest that there were many commonalities across the cases despite the different cultural and individual backgrounds of the teachers. The specific topic and individual lessons as well as the teachers' expectations based on their lesson planning seemed to influence what the teachers noticed in their teaching process. The study highlights the importance of attending to the situational aspects of teacher noticing and learning.

This paper explores faculty's perspectives and use of open educational resources (OER) and their repositories across different countries by conducting a multiple case study to find similarities and differences between academics' awareness, perceptions and use of OER, as well as examining related aspects of institutional policy and quality that may influence individual views. Data were collected through nine expert reports on each country studied (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Spain and Turkey) and were analyzed through qualitative content analysis using thematic coding. Findings show the impact on individual OER adoption with regard to the individual control of diverse factors by faculty members; of institutional policies and quality measures on the externally determined factors (by the institution); and of institutional professional development and provision of incentives in more internally determined factors (by the faculty members themselves). These findings carry implications for higher education institutions around the world in their attempt to boost OER adoption by faculty members.

Approximately a third of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) items in the core domains (math, reading, and science) are constructed-response items and require human coding (scoring). This process is time-consuming, expensive, and prone to error as often (a) humans code inconsistently, and (b) coding reliability in international large-scale assessments varies across items and countries. The shift in PISA 2015 from paper- to computer-based assessment digitized all responses and associated coding, thus providing opportunities to introduce technology and analytical methods to improve data processing and analyses in future cycles. In this computer-based setting, this research explains the framework and approach for improving the accuracy and efficiency of the coding process in constructed-response items for future PISA cycles. In the pilot study associated with this research, we demonstrate how the proposed machine-supported coding system can be utilized using sample reading items from the PISA 2015 cycle.

This paper discusses the noticeable nervousness of many US-based financial statement issuers in adopting IFRS. For contextual purposes, the paper provides an overview of the FASB/IFRS convergence so far and its probable future. A detailed review of convergence in accounting standards is explained through the respective standards for "Pensions and Other Post-Employment Benefits". The paper concludes by suggesting that, while one set of global steps is a noble goal, it might not achieve the desired goal of comparability.

Diaspora vloggers--migrants who produce video blogs in the language of their home countries for a transnational diaspora community--have been a largely overlooked group in the studies of social media. This paper focuses on the unique role of Chinese diaspora vloggers during an unprecedented global event--the COVID-19 pandemic. Using manual keyword search (e.g., "zhaijia riji," "faguo yiqing") and chance sampling (i.e., following platform recommendation), we collected 26 videos (07:44:30) from six Chinese YouTube micro-influencers (1-100k followers) located in Germany, the US, Australia, France, Italy, and Korea. Drawing on theories of narrative and stance-taking, we analyzed how these diaspora vloggers relate their experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that vloggers display both universal (e.g., fears) and culturally specific (e.g., mask-wearing) feelings, and invite their viewers to co-construe the emotional experience (e.g., the pronoun "ni" and address term "dajia"). Moreover, through different ways of "being Chinese", vloggers orient their discourse to a unique audience--transnational Chinese-speaking diaspora. Our findings point to the emergence of a new form of migrant identity in the age of social media and highlight the importance of understanding such identities in delivering public health information in global emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and determine the effectiveness of university education on the economy of various countries. Design/methodology/approach: To determine the necessity and expedience of making provision for the effectiveness of university education on the market economy, this work uses the method of regression and correlation analysis. Evaluation of effectiveness of the system of university education is performed separately for students, state, and employers by taking as example countries with specially developed formulas. Findings: The authors substantiate the necessity for provision of effectiveness of university education on the market economy, view the effective system of university education as a basis for the development of a knowledge economy, determine approaches to evaluate the effectiveness of university education on the market economy, perform evaluation of effectiveness of the system of university education by the example of various countries, determine its connection with indicators of economic growth and development, and provide recommendations for provision of effectiveness of the system of university education on modern market economies. Practical implications: The practical value of results of the conducted research consists in the possibility to use the developed formulas for determining the level of effectiveness of the system of university education on various countries of the world. Originality/value: Theoretical value of this paper consists in the possibility for the application of authors' conclusions and recommendations in the process of development of the policy of management of effectiveness of university education system.

Research on engineering practice is scarce and sharing of qualitative research data can reduce the effort required for an aspiring researcher to obtain enough data from engineering workplaces to draw generalizable conclusions, both qualitative and quantitative. This paper describes how a large shareable qualitative data set on engineering practices was accumulated from 350 interviews and 12 field studies performed by the principal investigator and by students conducting PhD and capstone research projects. Ethical research practice required that sharing and reuse of qualitative data be considered from the start. The researchers' interests and methods were aligned to maintain sufficient consistency to support subsequent analysis and re-analysis of data. Analysis helped to answer questions of fundamental significance for engineering educators: what do engineers do, and why are the performances of engineering enterprises so different in South Asia compared with similar enterprises in Australia? Analysis also demonstrated the overwhelming significance of technical collaboration in engineering practice. Conceiving engineering practice as a series of technical collaboration performances requires a more elaborate understanding of social interactions than is currently the case in engineering schools. Another finding is that global engineering competency could be better described in terms of "working with people who collaborate differently". Research helped to demonstrate that formal treatment of technical collaboration in an engineering curriculum could help avoid student misconceptions about engineering practice that hinder their subsequent engineering performances.

Cross-border higher education institutions are considered a main way to fulfill the educational internalization in Mainland China; to some extent they represent the attitude of entering the international market. In this paper, the history, status quo, and future of Chinese-foreign cooperatively-run schools are analyzed and discussed. Cross-border higher education institutions in Mainland China have experienced the process from accidental and disorder to a systematic and quality orientation.

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of highly cited articles published in the Web of Science category "Education and Educational Research" in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). A total of 2091 journal articles published in this category and cited more than 100 times up to the end of the year 2016 were retrieved as highly cited articles. Distributions of highly cited articles per publication year, journals, institutions and countries were analysed, as well as the citation life cycle of the top-cited articles. The USA, its institutions and researchers are the absolute leaders in the category of Education and Educational Research according to the results of the conducted analysis.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study the possibilities and potential barriers on the path of internationalization of the educational services market through development of the system of remote education. Design/methodology/approach: In order to determine the influence of development of the system of remote education on the process of internationalization of the educational services market, the authors use the method of regression analysis. A regression curve is built, containing the model of paired linear regression and the value of determination coefficient. The research object is the market of higher educational services -- as it is subject to internationalization and distribution of remote education. The research is performed based on the 2017 data by the example of countries from various regions of the world that show different rates and levels of socio-economic development but that achieved the largest success in development of the system of remote education -- the USA, the UK, Brazil, China, South Korea, Italy, Germany, India, Malaysia, Australia, South Africa and Russia. Due to the absence of the official international statistics on the issue of internationalization of the educational services market, the proprietary method is used for determining its level. Findings: It is concluded that remote education has a slight influence on the process of internationalization of the educational services market in the countries of the world, though it has large potential in the sphere of stimulation of internationalization of the educational services market, as it allows providing educational services of equal quality and equal cost for domestic and foreign students. Originality/value: The developed and presented model of managing the development of the remote education system of a modern university in the interests of stimulating internationalization of the educational services market allows overcoming these barriers and opening the existing potential of remote education in the sphere of stimulation of internationalization of the educational services market.

The Changing Academic Profession (CAP) international survey was designed in part to consider the effects of globalization on the work context and activities of academics in 19 countries or regions around the world. This paper draws from a subset of these data to explore the extent to which academics are globally connected in their research and teaching, and the ways this connectedness relates to global migration. Across multiple measures, immigrant academics (i.e., academics working in countries where they were not born and did not receive their first degree) were more globally connected than national academics (i.e., those working in the countries of their birth and first degree). Global migration by academic staff is clearly a major contributor to the internationalization of higher education institutions, yet there was no evidence these contributions led to enhanced career progress or job satisfaction for immigrant academics relative to national academics. The international expertise and experience of immigrant academics may not be sufficiently recognized and valued by their institutions.

The paper examines if there has been an increase in the attention paid to social and environmental issues (SEI) in accounting curricula. Using schools participating in the Aspen Institute's Beyond Grey Pinstripes (BGP) program, we measure the increase in the number of accounting courses incorporating SEI across the biennial application years of 2005, 2007 and 2009. We also examine the percentage of SEI coverage in accounting courses between 2007 and 2009. Our findings suggest that there was not an appreciable increase in the number of accounting courses dealing with SEI between 2005 and 2007, but that the increase was significant during the period from 2007 to 2009. Further, the increase over the four-year period from 2005 to 2009 was also significant. In addition, there is a significant increase in the percentage of SEI coverage in accounting courses between 2007 and 2009. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Background: The Project Yi Jin (PYJ), an alternative pathway for secondary school leavers and adults to further their education, has been receiving full support from the government, the Federation for Continuing Education in Tertiary Institutions (FCE) in Hong Kong and the public. Graduates of PYJ have the equivalent academic status of their counterparts in the main stream education. It was first implemented in 2000/01 by the FCE and has been offered to more than 35,000 students by 2006/07. With the success of the programme as a safety-net for a mass education system, it should continue to function more vigorously as new reforms are being implemented in the Hong Kong education scene in the future. The Chief Executive in his 2004 Policy Address has set out the direction to develop a new secondary and university system, i.e., (3+3) for secondary + 4 (tertiary) [the old one is (3+2+2)+3], to be launched in 2010/11, that will effectively prepare the next generation to cope with the challenges of the 21st century and the demands of the rapidly developing knowledge-based society. The new system, together with substantial modified curricula including the newly developed applied learning courses (ApL), is supposed to be able to look after all secondary students. Aims and focus of discussion: This paper aims to argue the necessity of launching a new version of Project Yi Jin (nPYJ) concurrently together with the new 3+3+4 academic system. In light of the contemporary global educational systems as compared to that of Hong Kong, it is postulated that the launching of nPYJ as a continuation of the successful PYJ is both legitimate and indispensable with regard to the carefully observed current global fashion of lifelong learning and continuing education in which diversity, equity, and flexibility are highly valued. Method: A comprehensive comparative review was carried out on eleven selected oriental and occidental countries and regions, namely, Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea, United Kingdom, United States, China, Taiwan, Singapore and Macao, focusing on the worldwide trend of constant high school drop-out rate as well as the mentioned countries' respective senior secondary schooling articulation policy leading to higher education, in particular shedding light on the establishment of alternative pathways towards tertiary education alongside the conventional educational track. Conclusion: With the literature backdrop and empirical support, it is shown that high school drop-outs are inevitable no matter how well-defined an education system may be. Thus this is where the "safety-net" contingency plan is found essential. A new version of Project Yi Jin (nPYJ), to be offered in parallel with the Hong Kong's new 3+3+4 secondary academic curricula, is indispensable to the new educational structure in the territory which fundamentally helps transform the conventionally somewhat segregated and elite educational system into a mass one. Regarding the curricular design, both PYJ and nPYJ will focus on generic skills and a wide range of electives will be offered as well to arouse students' interest of study. (Contains 1 figure, 1 table and 5 footnotes.)

In the late 1990s, sustained economic growth in most Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries and the development of the information economy led to a considerable increase in migration of highly skilled individuals, especially in science and technology. Some OECD countries relaxed their immigration policies to attract highly qualified foreigners to sectors facing labour shortages. In the context of increasing internationalization of education, academic mobility appears as a potential source of qualified workers from host countries' perspective, either during their studies or through subsequent recruitment. Study abroad can be part of a deliberate immigration strategy from the perspective of students. The article reviews the links between academic mobility and immigration and assesses impact on immigration policies. Indeed, some OECD countries are allowing foreign students to apply for resident status from within their territory as part of an immigration recruitment strategy. The impact for sending countries is also envisaged. (Contains 1 figure and 7 tables.)

This paper provides a network analysis of the international flow of students among 210 countries and the factors determining the structure of this flow. Among these factors, bilateral hyperlink connections between countries and the number of telephone minutes (communication variables) are the most important predictors of the flow's structure, followed by trade, the physical distance between countries, a common border between countries and a common language between two countries. The USA is by far the most central country in the flow of international students, followed by China, the UK, France, Germany, Australia and India. These results are discussed in light of World-System Theory. Future research should examine how the network of international student flows changes over time and consider additional factors to provide a better understanding of the network as an international system.