Emma Harden-Wolfson

Higher Education in Central Asia Blog (est. 2011)

  • MOOC, meet Kazakhstan: Surfing a new wave of MOOC innovation

    More MOOC madness? The trend in higher education for MOOCs – massive open online courses – shows no sign of abating. We’re now five years on from the so-called Year of the MOOC in 2012 and whilst MOOCs don’t make the headlines so often any more, the number of courses and providers continues to mushroom. In 2016,… Read more

  • New article published: The policy challenges of creating a world-class university outside the global ‘core’

    I’m pleased to share the publication of my latest journal article. Out online in the European Journal of Higher Education now (and in print in June), my article is called The policy challenges of creating a world-class university outside the global ‘core’ and takes a fresh look at the now commonplace idea of the world-class university. I used… Read more

  • Take a look at these links

    A long overdue update of my Links page is now available. Tucked away on the blog, the idea behind this page is to share reliable, interesting and/or fun websites that focus on Central Asia or higher education (but not both – I’m the only person doing that). I also have a few links to other websites and blogs that… Read more

  • A mountain to climb? Educating leaders for Central Asia

    At the start of this year, I shared a great article on the nascent University of Central Asia from Devex and Michael Igoe. If you enjoyed that, you’ll be pleased to hear that the article in fact came in three parts. In part two, A classroom for the mountains, Igoe discusses the intensity and rigour with which the undergraduate… Read more

  • If you want to get ahead, wear a dress

    The month of March brings with it the official start of spring, the vernal equinox (this year on 20 March), and in Tajikistan – as with other Central Asian countries – the celebration of Navruz / No’rooz, or New Light/Day. There are multiple spelling variations of what has been classified as an ‘intangible cultural heritage’… Read more

  • They cared for cattle more than kids -Tajik President recasts the Soviet era

    Whilst popular opinion across the former Soviet Union generally remembers the Soviet period with more than a hint of the rose-tinted glasses – see this summary of an EBRD survey in 2016 or this Sputnik News story on my blog from August 2016 – one man is seemingly on a mission to upend these conceptions. And he’s someone that people have… Read more