By Lloyd Armstrong, University Professor, University of Southern California
Modularization is critical to the success of industrial globalization because it enables global maximization of the production process by utilizing “best” producers of different modules. There are certainly components of cross-border higher education that can be described as modular. Nevertheless, the reality is that higher education at this time is not really thought of in modular terms, and that limits the impact of globalization in higher education. All of this may be about to change, however, because the Bologna Process is all about finding ways to define educational modules and create quality control mechanisms for those modules. It provides a fascinating look at ways in which educational modules are different from, and similar to, the modules that have enabled globalization in industry, and suggests that educational modularization ultimately may result in a remarkable shift of power from the institutions to the students. If it succeeds, the Bologna Process may show the way to rapid increases in the globalization of higher education.
The Bologna Process involves a number of components, all of which add up to a massive and daring remake of higher education in what is called the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), which includes at its core the countries of the European Union. The process takes its name from the Bologna Accords, which were signed in 1999 by the education ministers of 29 countries. Clifford Adelman at the Institute of Higher Education Policy, has recently written a very thorough and informative report on the current state of the Bologna Process called The Bologna Club: What U.S. Higher Education Can Learn from a Decade of European Construction. Although most U.S. attention has focused on the regional change to a three-year bachelor degree and two-year master degree, Adelman points out that this time-based description is misleading, and certainly not the most important and revolutionary part of the Process.
One of the goals of the Process is to use higher education to help develop and strengthen the identity of the European area. To this end, the Process seeks to make it easier for students in Europe to move from institutions in one country to those in another, encouraging them to think of themselves as “European” students rather than specifically “French”, “Hungarian” or otherwise. Education should move across national boundaries (at least within the EHEA) as easily as capital or goods. Thus the major educational initiative of the Process is to facilitate such mobility by bringing increased uniformity to definitions of academic courses and degrees and to quality control.
This is an enormously complex task, since the Process recognizes that the goal is not to “standardize” courses and degrees by removing variation, history and context from offerings, but rather to provide a set of reference points that enable one institution to evaluate clearly the educational attainments of a student from another institution. In Adelman’s terms, the goal is to harmonize, not standardize.
The process of harmonization plays out at several levels. This effort begins with a Framework for Qualifications of various generic degrees (e.g. bachelor’s, master’s, or more correctly, first cycle, second cycle), which are related to one another by a “ratchet” principle – that is, each higher degree relates to the previous one, but with higher levels of attainment. As Adelman writes:
Under the Framework for Qualifications there are five learning outcome constructs, each of which evidences the “ratchet principle” in their descriptions:
- The reference points of “knowledge and understanding”;
- The contexts and modes of application of knowledge and understanding;
- Fluency in the use of increasingly complex data and information;
- Breadth and depth of topics communicated, along with the range of audiences for that communication; and
- Degree of autonomy gained for subsequent learning.
As one moves up through the texts of the credential ladder, one notes the 