European convergence activities: "As a support to the contribution of Higher education institutions to the regional development".
Throughout these activities our main aims are to promote the Canarian universities to reach a level of European convergence which allows them to be competitive within the European scene, and to establish actions with national and European agencies in order to contribute to the exchange of information about the European Higher Education Area and the OCDE of management and assessment.
The organization for the cooperation and economic development (OCED), in its program of institutional management in higher education, has proposed an activity called:
“As a support to the contribution of Higher education institutions to the regional development”. This survey has been carried out with the coordination of ACECAU between February 2005 and April 2006, as one of the parts of a
general project of the OCED where 24 regions of 12 countries took part. The main aim of this survey was to provide the higher education institutions and regional and national governments with a coherent corpus of politics and practices directed to encourage the dialogue between the universities and the regional agents to support the development of their respective regions.
The actions of this project have been used to promote the reflection about how the mechanisms of the connections among universities and regional agents could contribute to the improvement of competitiveness and the feasibility of both in a global context where the development is based on the generation of knowledge and innovation.
The report was evaluated by international experts .These experts, who visited the region to get information, were proposed by OCED.
The working group in charge of drafting the initial report was compounded by some
authors. It was brought out at the end of 2006, when the external assessors were visiting our region, from 17 to 21 April.
The group of assessors proposed by OCED was constituted by:
Dr Chris Duke, main assessor. Director of Higher Education for the NIACE and honorific teacher of Lifelong Learning in Leicester and Stirling, United Kingdom. Teacher of Regional Associations and Learning at the Royal Institute of Technology, Melbourne (Australia). President of the International Observatory Pascal for Regions of Learning.
Dr Walter Uegama: Consultant of some international organizations and Higher Education institutions. He has performed different academic and administrative posts in Higher Education institutions in Canada such as: vice-president associated of Continued Studies in the University of British Columbia, Dean of Adult Education in the Institute of Open Learning in British Columbia. Lately, he has been in charge of the post of Higher Consultant in the Commonwealth of Learning for the development of his master In Business studies and Public management.
José Ginés Mora Ruiz. Director of the center of Higher Education Management Studies in the University Politecnica de Valencia. President of the European Society of Higher Education and member of the committee of government of IMHE and OCED. He is also an associated editor of Tertiary Education and Management as well as member of the Publishing Committee of Politics and Management of Higher Education, and ex co-editor of the European Journal of Education.
Francisco Marmolejo Cervantes, coordinator of the committee. Director of the CONAHEC in the University of Arizona since 1995. He has also been a member of the American Council of Education in the University of Massachusetts-Amherst; vice-president of management and finances and vice-president of Academic Planning in the University of Las Americas, Mexico City.
RESULT OF THIS WORK:
Three documents:
Two documents are devoted to the analysis of the region of the Canary Islands.
A document where the experiences of the participants are gathered.
In April 22 at ten o’clock, In Hotel Escuela in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, ACECAU presented the results of the project “Support to the development of the Canary Islands from its Higher Education Institutions”. The representatives of Canarian universities, cabildos of Gran Canaria and Tenerife, the Chamber of Commerce and the confederations of businessmen attended the act. The following manual shows a summary of the most outstanding proposals and conclusions to the Canaries. This document describes a specific moment in a situation of evaluation. This situation is particularly dynamic in the context of Spain due to the reason that there are important national expectations about the gradual harmonization of the Higher Education system towards the goals of Bologna.
