Briefly: Turkish University to Offer Armenian Language Course

Turkish university to offer Armenian language course

Using a $23,500 grant from the German Marshall Fund’s Black Sea Trust, Kadir Has University in Istanbul plans to begin offering Armenian language lessons this month.

Serdar Dinler, director of the university’s Center for Lifelong Learning, said by telephone that the course would be taught by a doctoral candidate from Armenia as part of a cultural exchange between countries whose ties have been fraught for a century.

“Turkey is becoming an energy-transit corridor and a center for diplomacy in the region,” Mr. Dinler said. “Also the Turkish government has a new ‘zero problems’ policy with its neighbors, so we believe that the new generation in Turkey needs to have more dialogue with neighboring countries, including Armenia, Russia, Iran, Greece, etc. Knowing the language can only help.”

Kadir Has is a private university established along the Golden Horn in 1997 and named after its founder, a Turkish automotive magnate.

— SUSANNE FOWLER

Students not ready to adopt Kindle for notes and reading

Just seven months after adopting an e-reading device, the Kindle DX, for university-level reading and note-taking, some 60 percent of students had put it aside in favor of traditional learning material, according to a new study presented at a conference on human-computer interaction by the Association for Computing Machinery in Vancouver, British Columbia, last week.

The study’s authors are investigating the impact of electronic reading devices on higher learning. “We are still trying to understand what we lose or gain by the adoption of e-reading technology,” said Alex Thayer, the primary co-author of the study and a doctoral student in human centered design and engineering at the University of Washington.

Students found it difficult to adapt traditional reading, scanning and note-taking methods to the platform. The study’s authors found that the e-reader disrupted students’ ability to remember the physical location of passages and notes in book.

However, the study also found that the e-reader, owing to its size and portability, was more likely to replace paper-based learning than computer-based learning. Students are more likely to use a Kindle than a computer on public transit, for example, Mr. Thayer explained.

The study is based on the learning habits of 39 first-year graduate students at the University of Washington’s department of computer science and engineering. Despite a relatively small sample size, the study represents one of the first to look at long term academic learning habits of students using electronic readers, according to the study’s authors.

“E-readers are not where they need to be in order to support academic reading,” Professor Charlotte Lee, who led the study, said in a statement.

— CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE

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Briefly: China Said to Plan Campus in Laos

China has long been a favored destination for foreign universities seeking to export their programs, but now a Chinese university is preparing to open the mainland’s first overseas campus.

Soochow University, in Jiangsu Province, is expected to open an affiliate in Laos next year, according to People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party.

The report, posted late last month, called Soochow the first foreign education institution to receive approval from the Laotian government to offer undergraduate and graduate programs. The university plans to provide courses for about 5,000 students in Laos, a country of more than six million where only 13 percent of the undergraduate-age population is enrolled in higher education, according to 2008 Unesco statistics.

A university official quoted in the report said Soochow would offer 12 majors, including Chinese language and literature, economy and trade, and engineering. Soochow University, which has about 50,000 students in China, expects the Laos campus to begin enrolling students next year, the report said.

While the university will initially send Chinese academics to the Laos campus, it plans to gradually employ more local teachers. The campus is estimated to cost $25 million.

— LIZ GOOCH

London music college plans to offer degree in Singapore

Students in Singapore will soon be able to pursue a music degree conferred by the Royal College of Music in London. The college, one of the world’s leading music conservatories, has signed a partnership with the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts to confer, for the first time, its degree outside of Britain.

Intended as a degree course that builds on Nanyang Academy’s three-year music diploma program, the new program will give students the choice of five music disciplines: keyboard, composition, orchestral, vocal and Chinese instrumental studies.

The Singaporean government will significantly subsidize some tuition fees for the two-year degree course, to be offered starting in August. Although full fee for the bachelor of music degree course is 56,000 Singapore dollars, or about $45,450, the government subsidy means that Singaporean students will pay 18,500 dollars over the two years. Permanent residents will pay 23,400 dollars.

At the signing of the deal, Nanyang Academy’s president, Choo Thiam Siew, said that as the economic center of gravity moves toward the east, so too has Asian education, and correspondingly, Asian arts have witnessed greater attention.

“We have seen an influx of international students choose to do their exchanges or internships in Singapore, as well as witness more collaborations between Singapore and other international schools,” he said.

“The recent announcement of Singapore’s first Liberal Arts College through a partnership between Yale and N.U.S. is a prime example,” he added, referring to the National University of Singapore. “Our partnership with the distinguished Royal College of Music is another step in this inevitable direction of educational marriages between the West and the East.”

— SONIA KOLESNIKOV-JESSOP

Grant is offered to build Israeli liberal arts college

The Shalem Center announced Tuesday that it had been awarded a $12.5 million challenge grant from the Tikvah Fund to found what its sponsors say would be Israel’s first liberal arts college.

Israeli institutes of higher education typically offer three-year programs on a particular subject. Shalem College, by contrast, would be the first to offer a four-year bachelor of arts degree along the American model and would also be the first to feature an undergraduate senior thesis as a graduation requirement, said Daniel Polisar, president of the Shalem Center.

Although Shalem College would be open to international students, the main goal is to enroll Israelis. Classes would be taught in Hebrew, though plans are being discussed to develop a yearlong program for overseas English speakers.

“A young, democratic country like Israel needs thoughtful leaders, active, engaged citizens, and people as broad as possible in their knowledge,” Mr. Polisar said.

The Shalem Center, founded in 1994, is devoted to the study of Jewish and Zionist history, philosophy and political theory, and Middle East studies, among other topics. The grant by the Tikvah Fund, a New York organization devoted to the promotion of Jewish thought and traditions, is intended to encourage others to donate toward creation of the school.

— REBECCA APPEL