Yugosphere

By Jüri Lõssenko of EITF

For entities in Yugosphere see Category:Yugosphere

Regional overview

The Yugosphere is a category used to describe the present day states which succeeded the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. For its members see Category:Yugosphere. The territory of the former Yugoslavia is roughly coterminous with the geographical region of the Western Balkans; in the EU's definition of the term, the Western Balkans excludes Slovenia but includes Albania.

Slovenia is the only country of the former Yugoslavia in the EU. Croatia, Macedonia, and Montenegro are official candidates, while Serbia has submitted an application for membership and have been recognized as a "potential candidate". Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republic of Kosovo have not submitted an application but are nevertheless recognized as "potential candidates" for a possible future enlargement of the European Union. All states of the former Yugoslavia, with the exception of the disputed Autonomous Province of Kosovo, have subscribed to the Stabilisation and Association Process with the EU.

The CIA Factbook has estimates for the populations of Yugoslavia's successor states as of July 2011 which amount to a total population of 23.0 million. Net population growth over the three decades between 1981 and 2011 was thus practically zero (below 0.1% p.a. on average). Ethno-linguistically, the majority of the former Yugoslavia is South Slavic, speaking a dialect continuum clustered around the Serbo-Croatian, Slovene and Macedonian. Other larger ethnic groups include Albanians (mostly in Kosovo), Hungarians (mostly in Vojvodina), Roma and other minorities.

Further and Higher education in Region

All countries in the region are implementing the Bologna Process with an orientation towards current EU policy, notably the Lisbon strategy and its successor. Countries have started to align their policies towards the strategic EU goals (such as growth, creation of jobs, investments in higher education and research) which are especially pertinent goals for the region. The Bologna Process is a central driver in the current reform of region’s higher education systems and the Bologna Process is perceived as “providing a direction that is essential for societal development”. Croatia joined the Bologna Process in 2001, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia in 2003, and Kosovo has an observer status. Another influential factor in higher education development has been the EU’s official integration politics in relation to the Western Balkan Countries. Within the politics of the region, education has always been assigned a major role in promoting democratization, socio-economic development, and civil society. The countries are eligible to participate in a number of EU programs such as TEMPUS, Erasmus Mundus (under the “WBC Window” and the “External Cooperation Window”), Youth, the framework programs for research (7th Framework Program 2007-13, including a specialized cooperation instrument for the Western Balkans), the activities of the Joint Research Centre (JRC), and the European Training Foundation (ETF).

Higher education systems have been expanding over the past decades in all European countries. The growth rates in the countries of the Yugosphere within the last 10 years have been especially high and are also among the highest worldwide. In some countries student numbers have doubled within a decade. Along with the increase in the number of students, the number of HE institutions has been increasing and quality issues arose in several countries during these times of rapid expansion. Another development has been the growing importance of private (and accredited) HEIs in the region as legislation has gradually been changed to allow the establishment of private institutions. Access to HE is mostly regulated by school leaving examination marks and entrance examinations (as in many other European countries). The accent is often put on the entrance examinations which the universities can usually regulate independently. Typical of the region is the so-called paid education in public institutions: students not achieving the necessary criteria for state-funded education can be admitted to public universities on a tuition fee basis. Fee-paying students can represent a significant resource of funds to universities and the paid education system can pose problems in terms of equal access and quality in education.

Education reform

Considering the entire region, reforms in education have concentrated mainly on the following areas:

• Adjustment and review of existing national legal frameworks in line with ongoing European developments and national reform priorities
• Decentralisation of education management and administration, with a focus on quality enhancement and accountability
• Development of education management information systems and quality assurance mechanisms
• Curriculum reform in line with European trends and developments
• Widening access to quality education and ensuring equal opportunities - taking account of gender equality - for national minorities, especially Roma communities, and other disadvantaged groups including members of low income groups, people with disabilities, citizens from isolated rural communities, etc.
• Promotion of education for democratic citizenship in both formal and non-formal education programmes
• Ensuring access to, and effective use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
• Development of opportunities for lifelong learning as a key means to stimulate economic regeneration in the region
• Vocational education and training, especially establishing links between education and labour market

Administration and finance

Yugosphere countries have also started to pass new legislation increasingly aligning their higher education systems with the concept of institutional autonomy, thereby enabling HEIs to (re)act more flexibly and efficiently to societal needs. There is yet another dimension of autonomy within the region: it is the autonomy and self-management of single faculties, schools or departments, which is a legacy of the former Yugoslavian republics. The historically relatively high level of legal, functional, financial and academic autonomy of single faculties hinders the process of modernization and the implementation of coherent reform measures not only within the countries, but even within one institution. One of the central milestones to be achieved in the former Yugoslavian states is to overcome this challenge.

A related problem is the professionalization of staff and the improvement of institutional management (internal governance). Inefficient and ineffective structures and procedures will have to be reduced while competent intermediary bodies for specific tasks, such as funding, research management, student services or quality assurance have to be established and staff at all levels professionalized. Legislation in some countries has been revised to give HEIs more financial and budgetary autonomy and flexibility but in total the systems are still very rigid, relying heavily on input factors and not providing many opportunities to reward successful reform-oriented approaches

Quality assurance

Internal and external quality assurance is relatively new to the region and is furthermore complicated by the aforementioned peculiarities of the HE system. Quite often external quality assurance bodies have only been recently established by law. Internal quality management is an issue as well and as a European study revealed, little change or improvement has been registered regarding internal quality processes. A significant aspect seems to be that the basic tools for quality assurance are often lacking. University-wide data is rarely available in a coherent form and the lack of effective central management and administrative systems means that data gathering and analysis is time consuming and unreliable. Feedback and monitoring mechanisms are weak and inconsistent across institutions. Another factor in both internal and external quality management is that the region lacks professional staff and experts in this area and countries of the region could benefit from increased regional cooperation.

Information society

Regional cooperation in the field of ICT development has taken place in the context of the Electronic South East Europe (eSEE) initiative, which promotes the creation of adequate institutional mechanisms for the development of information society, and facilitates the introduction of ICT technologies in various sectors. By now, all countries in the region have acknowledged the importance of ICT infrastructure, and have increasingly invested in its development, which has resulted in overall growth of the sector of electronic communication, and all countries have higher than 95% digitization of the fixed network. It is promising that the broadband usage has grown at very high speed in the last few years, whereas DSL technology is the dominating technology, followed by Cable TV. Nevertheless, the broadband remains still very limited in most countries which could limit the usage of the full range of digital content and services. The levels of Internet access are low - averaging at about 20 users per 100 inhabitants for the entire region, with Croatia being the best performer with 45%. It is promising, that the Internet users have reached very high percentage of growth in the last few years.

ICT in education initiatives

“EU IT Pilot Project in the Field of Education”

The objective of this project is to support the Kosovo Government in improving the quality and efficiency of education and training services. This is to be done through support in introducing training of teachers and educational staff in ICT and how to use ICT technology in the teaching and learning process and the establishment of an EDUCATION network for data and information exchange linking education actors at local and central level which can then also be linked across a European education networks. The project will assure compatibility with the eLearning Strategy of Kosovo. The pilot project will develop and establish following:

• An effective ICT education network (EDUNet) connecting all beneficiaries and stakeholder institutions involved in the piloting phase at central and local level;
• Train teachers and support centre staff in how to use IT in their work;
• Train teachers on eLearning and its application using pilot schools to field-test;
• Develop and establish an eContent repository and develop eContent, including modules in local languages;
• Train pilot schools and other relevant stakeholders in the education system to develop and maintain web-sites and web-portals.

References

• http://www.wus-austria.org/files/docs/manual5_endps.pdf
• Former Yugoslavia patches itself together: Entering the Yugosphere, Aug 20th 2009 | BELGRADE, From The Economist print edition, http://www.rcc.int/download.php?tip=docs&doc=The+Economist_Entering+the+Yugosphere_200809.pdf&doc_url=571842b83a39edf9f6318bb9faebb32a
• Free Malësia: The Yugosphere, blog posting of 2 June 2009, http://freemalesia.blogspot.com/2009/06/yugosphere.html
• The Yugo-sphere, blog posting of 28 September 2009, http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ecclblog/blogentry.aspx?blogentryref=7915
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Former_Yugoslavia
• http://www.stabilitypact.org/education/030628-actionplan.pdf
• http://csconf.org/Volume3/page881.pdf

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