Bologna

We had an excellent AUA one-day conference last week on "the Bologna Process: the London summit and the third cycle of HE".

For me the most interesting learning point was the way in which a number of the presentations emphasised the benefits to students of institutions engaging with the Bologna Process, and the strategic dangers to institutions of not doing so. I think for many colleagues the seminar helped dispel the notion that Bologna was a bureaucratic exercise in harmonisation.  There was a very strong message that there are real benefits to students' future employability through the emphasis on greater mobility between participant countries.  For institutions it provides an opportunity if tackled strategically (e.g. access to wider pools of staff and student talent), but a threat if not.

There was a feeling that many institutions are still ignoring Bologna, or doing the minimum possible to comply (e.g. issuing students with the European Diploma Supplement).  This was probably arising from a combination of the voluntary nature of the Process, the fact that the rhetoric of it being driven bottom-up by institutions rather than top-down by governments is not the reality, and the difficulties which many institutions have in engaging with the alphabet soup of acronyms, bodies, communiques and conferences, and the shifting focus of secretariat responsibility that goes with European inter-governmental processes. 

Also relevant within the UK is the relative ease of compliance compared to the position in many other countries.  This is perhaps also contributing to a sense of complacency in UK institutions, which is reinforced by the apparently relative lower level of engagement of the NUS with it compared to sister organisations in continental Europe meaning that we don't face the same student pressures.  But we need to be alert to the fact that consideration is now being given by institutions in other parts of the world (e.g. Australia and the USA) on how to respond to Bologna, including changing curricular structures to be Bologna-compliant. 

One colleague commented that Bologna was a major paradigm shift in higher education, and that the benefits would flow to those institutions which appreciated this most quickly.

Bruce Nelson
Chair

Comments

[Caroline Auty]

There is now a resource area at:

http://www.aua.ac.uk/international/bologna/

which includes useful links, sources of information, and key presentations from AUA's Bologna conference.

[sebiotimo surajudeen s.]

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