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This short paper recognises the growth in emphasis in work-based learning as Europe moves forward on economically driven life-long learning. We support such a move and point to issues which still need to be resolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades regional agreements have become more significant in educational and training. This paper situates and analyses the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), the Bologna Process and the Lisbon Strategy and explores their influence on the integration of higher education systems in Mercosur (the Southern Common Market of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela). Mercosur is still a customs union, and the project of integrating higher education is at an early stage. Lacking organically established regional bodies, coordination of integration in Mercosur has focused on summits and meetings of officials. However, in a context of unequal maturity in regional integration, there is emerging evidence that the EHEA project is influencing the reforms of national systems of higher education and even Mercosur’s model for a regional area of higher education. A nascent Europeanization of higher education systems in the Mercosur region is emerging, by-passing Mercosur’s regional structures. The formulation of policies has been permeated by policy transfer from Europe to national territories within Mercosur. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Competence-oriented restructuring of curricular content for the study of geographic information system (GIS) in higher education has become a primary educational enterprise in Europe due to the Bologna Reform. Although there are different international curricular documents for outcome-based design of learning activities within the geographic information science and technology domain, it has not yet been clarified which competences should be considered essential components of a university-level course of study in GIS. Our content analysis of those curricular documents demonstrates that there are three dimensions of core competences foundational to the study of GIS in higher education, which are GIS knowledge and skills, spatial thinking, and problem-solving. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The requirements placed on Olympic and professional athletes in contemporary world sport are such that they need to dedicate themselves more and more to achieving excellence. This immediately implies that most athletes' time is dedicated to developing their sporting career, with very little time left to develop other aspects of their lives outside their sport. The reality facing many elite athletes is that few are sufficiently financially rewarded to allow them to make a living out of their sport, and even fewer can rely on measures in place in their own country to assist with the financial and psychological impacts of their retirement from sport [Stambulova, N., Stephan Y., and Japhag U. ‘Athletic Retirement: A Cross-National Comparison of Elite French and Swedish Athletes’.Psychology of Sport and Exercise8 (2007): 101–18.]. This places even more importance on the need for the athlete either to have a ‘dual career’ or to prepare for a post-athletic career while still participating in elite sport. The current work is an attempt to identify both the opportunities and constraints that have been experienced by student-athletes in combining an academic and sporting career successfully in three European contexts: Finland, France and the UK. It also proposes a rationale outlining eight reasons that student-athletes identified to justify their decision to pursue a dual career path. This is an important contribution to this field of research, as till date there has been hardly any evidence that claims that the two careers were not simply mutually compatible but in fact mutually complementary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article investigates planning education programmes and attempts to re-orient them in the context of both an international 'problematique' in reforming planning education, and European Union directives about the creation of a common European space in higher education. First, the article reviews the international trends in changes and challenges in planning and planning education in the 21st century and proposes an 'integration model' of planning education programmes in a European and international context. Second, the article focuses on the development of planning studies in Greece. It presents their history and development as well as the institutional framework in which planning and planning education operate. It then analyses the Greek educational curricula in two ways: (1) a quantitative analysis classifying courses into different thematic areas and thereby, revealing the basic structure of the curricula; and (2) a qualitative analysis based on interviews with academic staff in charge of educational curricula and examining the content of courses, the adopted pedagogies and possible restrictions (e.g. human capital, institutional framework, etc.) in introducing effective planning curricula. Finally, the article proposes guidelines for re-orienting educational curricula in Greek schools of planning and draws out wider implications for planning studies in the wider European and international context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]