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Ethics and ethical behaviour are the fundamental pillars of a civilised society. The focus on ethical behaviour is indispensable in certain fields such as medicine, finance, or law. In fact, ethics gets precedence with anything that would include, affect, transform, or influence upon individuals, communities or any living creatures. Many institutions within Europe have set up their own committees to focus on or approve activities that have ethical impact. In contrast, lesser-developed countries (worldwide) are trying to set up these committees to govern their academia and research. As the first European consortium established to assist academic integrity, European Network for Academic Integrity (ENAI), we felt the importance of guiding those institutions and communities that are trying to conduct research with ethical principles. We have established an ethical advisory working group within ENAI with the aim to promote ethics within curriculum, research and institutional policies. We are constantly researching available data on this subject and committed to help the academia to convey and conduct ethical behaviour. Upon preliminary review and discussion, the group found a disparity in understanding, practice and teaching approaches to ethical applications of research projects among peers. Therefore, this short paper preliminarily aims to critically review the available information on ethics, the history behind establishing ethical principles and its international guidelines to govern research. The paper is based on the workshop conducted in the 5th International conference Plagiarism across Europe and Beyond, in Mykolas Romeris University, Lithuania in 2019. During the workshop, we have detailed: (1) basic needs of an ethical committee within an institution; (2) a typical ethical approval process (with examples from three different universities); and (3) the ways to obtain informed consent with some examples. These are summarised in this paper with some example comparisons of ethical approval processes from different universities. We believe this paper will provide guidelines on preparing and training both researchers and research students in appropriately upholding ethical practices through ethical approval processes.

Background: Growing demand for Global Health (GH) training and the internationalisation of education requires innovative approaches to training. Blended learning (BL, a form of e-learning combining face-to-face or real-time interaction with computer-assisted learning) is a promising approach for increasing GH research capacity in low- to middle-income countries. Implementing BL, however, requires additional skills and efforts from lecturers. This paper explores lecturers' views and experiences of delivering BL courses within the context of two north-south collaborative research capacity building projects, ARCADE HSSR and ARCADE RSDH. Design: We used a qualitative approach to explore the experiences and perceptions of 11 lecturers involved in designing and delivering BL courses collaboratively across university campuses in four countries (South Africa, Uganda, India and Sweden). Data were collected using interviews in person or via Skype. Inductive qualitative content analysis was used. Results: Participants reported that they felt BL increased access to learning opportunities and made training more flexible and convenient for adult learners, which were major motivations to engage in BL. However, despite eagerness to implement and experiment with BL courses, they lacked capacity and support, and found the task time consuming. They needed to make compromises between course objectives and available technological tools, in the context of poor Internet infrastructure. Conclusions: BL courses have the potential to build bridges between low- and middle-income contexts and between lecturers and students to meet the demand for GH training. Lecturers were very motivated to try these approaches but encountered obstacles in implementing BL courses. Considerable investments are needed to implement BL and support lecturers in delivering courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bologna Process initiated a radical change within higher education institutions. This change triggered the creation of new administrative procedures in the every day life of European universities. It also gave rise to the emergence of new concepts for the description of curricula. It is critical for the successful continuation of this process to support the publication and exchange of information among universities. With this aim in mind, we created the Bowlogna Ontology to model an academic setting as proposed by the Bologna reform. In this paper, we present our efforts to design this ontology and the entire process that lead to its creation starting from the definition of a linguistic lexicon derived from the Bologna reform and its conversion to a formal ontology. We also describe practical applications of our ontology for end-users at universities (such as a faceted search and browsing system for course information). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the flexibility of informatic systems in the context of multiple and unavoidable changes at the level of companies. The concept of flexibility of informatic systems is defined and we present the factors which determine the flexibility along the whole life cycle of the informatic system. Each university is mainly interested in improving higher education and this holds true both at national and international level. At first sight the activities within a university may seem simple, but in reality they are very complex and dynamic. The application is based on the following basic requirements: on the one hand, the planning of lesson schedule of degree corses, on the other hand, the chance of having an application for constantly monitoring the occupation of classrooms or any other structure of the university. Therefore the application requires a precise and detailed mapping of all physical structures of the University. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalisation, together with readier access to capability-enhancing technologies and to technological insights once restricted to a few leading economies, are resulting in greater competition within Europe, and more widely within the developed world, for influence of all kinds (not just influence over the choices that foreign students make about the Higher Education courses on offer to them from Europe, but also influence of a more overtly imperialist kind, extending to the policies, incomes and futures of others). This article looks at trends in one important market for European Higher Education, the Middle East (particularly the GCC countries), which has many providers from North America and Australia. As observed by the late Edward Said, the USA is particularly forceful in the Middle East. Its technological superiority is accompanied by fervour to introduce American methods and curricula, and strong belief in their merit, reminiscent of the belief of the old French empire that ‘France had a “mission civilisatrice”, to civilize the natives”. The danger, highlighted in a recent UNESCO report ‘New Ignorances, New Literacies’, is that the natives will not be listened to. Is Europe listening more or less than the USA, and is it being listened to? Despite attention-gaining initiatives such as the proposed European Institute of Technology, EIT, and the commitment of EU governments to the Lisbon goals on competitiveness, there are indications of a drop in the influence of European Higher Education institutions in the Middle East. This paper explores the kinds of issues that may be at work, and the implications for European Higher Education policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bologna declaration aims at providing solutions for the problems and challenges of European Higher Education. One of its main goals is the introduction of a common framework of transparent and comparable degrees that ensures the recognition of knowledge and qualifications of citizens all across the European Union. This paper will discuss an ontology-based model that supports the creation of transparent curricula content (Educational Ontology) and the promotion of reliable knowledge testing (Adaptive Knowledge Testing System). Beside the description of the evolution of the Educational Ontology, which has been developed within a research project by the Department of Information Systems, role of the ontology in managing, mapping and sharing the knowledge of curricula will be discussed in details as well. The Educational Ontology addresses establishing relation between the requirements of labour markets and the content of curricula through competencies that can be acquired during a given training program. Another critical aspect of this research concerns the measuring of knowledge. The second part of the paper will focus on the possibilities of adaptive knowledge testing and describes how a suitably elaborated ontology model can support adaptive testing of students by enabling a detailed exploration of missing knowledge and knowledge areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines three examples of cross-border higher education collaboration in Europe in order to throw light on one European region where such collaboration is only in its early stages of development. The main region examined is the Öresund region covering the Skåne area of Southern Sweden centred on Malmo and the Zealand region of Denmark which incorporates the Copenhagen region. Additionally, and more briefly, the Upper Rhine collaboration of the EUCOR universities and the ALMA collaboration (Netherlands, Germany and Belgium) are considered. Lessons from these examples are then used to assist in the assessment of existing collaboration between higher education institutions in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland and the possibilities for further collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the impact of accountability on higher education policies in Europe and the United States. We describe how the accountability movement relates to other policy trends in higher education, providing empirical data on how accountability was implemented and how academics and managers in four universities perceived these policies. We close the article with a reflection on the observed shift from professional to political accountability that uses `soft' mechanisms that seem to offer little change in the quality of education in these countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]