Higher education in Asian countries and the role of international ...

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A large part of the OECD‟s activities consists of gathering, analyzing, and disseminating
information. OECD uses publications as its principal tool for presenting and disseminating its
research work and intellectual output to support and encourage policy reforms and economic
development. In the field of education, the Organization achieves its goals through four major
programs: PISA, IMHE, CELE and CERI. In the field of higher education OECD is engaged in
many activities and it is taking measure today to bring a change tomorrow. Some of the OECD‟s
initiatives are:
a) Thematic review of tertiary education
b) The Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross-border Higher Education
c) Thematic Review on Adult learning
d) AHELO-Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes
e) Quality Teaching in Higher Education
f) The OECD Global Forums: Education
In Asia, OECD has very low presence and visibility as it has only four full-members in this
continent: Israel, Japan, Korea and Turkey. These member countries represent only 0.7% of the
Asian population. Though three enhanced engagement countries and fifteen non-member
countries are present on OECD forum except for the four member countries, Asian countries do
not have a proper representation in the OECD‟s boards, councils, committees, forums, networks,
task forces and working groups. The non-member Asian countries and even countries with a
status of Enhance Engagement have a very low or no presence in these bodies including
education sector.
The OECD collects, analyses, disseminates and diffuses a great deal of data and information on
the partner economies every year but on Asia comparatively very limited information is
available. On Asian partner economies, since year 2000 OECD‟s Directorate for Education has
produced only 123 reviews and surveys, 25 reports and 50 publications. Majority of these
document were on four Asian member economies.
OECD maintains three types of databases: OECD.Stat Extracts, OECD.Stat and Statistics from A
to Z - Beta version. These repositories are not fully open to public access. Though on economic
OECD has a rich data bank,the data available on education is not very rich in terms of number of
variable as well number of non-member countries covered: OECD.Stat Extracts presents data on