Despite the claimed worth and huge interest regarding the increasing volumes of complex data sets and the rewarding promise to improve research, there is, however, a growing concern regarding data privacy that affects both qualitative and quantitative higher education research. Within the contemporary debates on the impact of Big Data on the nature of higher education research and the effective ways to harmonize Big Data practice with privacy restrictions and regulations, this study sets out to qualitatively examine current issues regarding data privacy, anonymity, informed consent and confidentiality in data-centric higher education research, with a focus on the data collector, data subject and data user. We argue that within current regulations, data protection of research subjects concerns more data collection and disclosure and insufficiently describes use, having procedural implications for both the complex nature of higher education (HE) research and the type of research data being collected. We work our argument through an examination of several factors that call for a reconsideration of data privacy and access to private information in HE research. The conclusions indicate that Big Data-centric HE research is increasingly becoming a mainstream research paradigm which needs to address critical data privacy issues before being widely embraced.

Within the context of bourgeoning institutions that rank higher education institutions, this paper examines the merits and demerits of university rankings and diverse ranking methodologies. It explores and presents recent developments and diversification of international rankings and highlights their general trend towards more broadly balanced and multidimensional criteria. The paper concludes that like any other complex endeavour, rankings have their pros and cons but the latter does not justify their abandonment. What is required is public education that builds a discerning user who can optimally gain from the use of rankings while avoiding their pitfalls. The original version of this article was first published in the UNESCO volume Rankings and Accountability in Higher Education: Uses and Misuses (2013) Paris: UNESCO.

News is central to human communication and has an important signifying power as a particular subsystem within language. This study sets out to comprehensively examine how four major TV global news providers – CNN, BBC, DW and RT – have covered the COVID-19 pandemic from outbreak to mid-crisis. We apply a multi-level content analysis approach that rests on theories of proximization and representation of distant suffering, following a computer-assisted analysis that aids in identifying concepts occurrence and the semantic relationship among the highly frequent clusters. We explore the news representation during 2020 of COVID-19 as proximal versus distant discourses of suffering, safety and compassion conceptualized in light of theories on distant suffering. A total number of 12 dataset reports consisting of 2,017,875 words were analyzed. The results suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic news formulates a particular type of discourse on suffering that individualizes the sufferer, sets out the course of action and turns the fast-approaching pandemic into a global cause for action.

In the context of the ever growing use of technology through e-learning and open-courseware, our paper describes a project that is being carried out by a consortium of twelve university partners and is coordinated by the University of Maastricht and RAND Europe (Cambridge). This project sets out to examine the evolution and sustainability of the innovative modes of higher education provision in teaching and learning across Europe, the motivations for their emergence as well as the ways in which higher education management and governance have responded and adapted to such new modes of provision. In the highly competitive sector of higher education (HE), while attempting to enhance the quality of teaching and learning, the increasing range of teaching and learning providers (encouraging both new delivery models and the ‘unbundling of delivery’ through partnerships, spin-out organisations, franchising, etc.), has challenged the ‘traditional’ model of university and stimulated changes in the provision and management of higher education. Our paper describes the general framework of the project, foregrounding the first preliminary results of the first European-wide analysis of such innovative modes of provision in teaching and learning in Europe.

Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania is moving rapidly towards more evidence-based accountability and, in this context, it has a growing concern with an ever more adequate provision for labor market demands in the region. The present paper analyzes the new graduate-tracing metrics of university management performance and goals between 2004 and 2012 and sets the short-term goals agenda for enhancement of graduate employment and employability at LBUS.