Guidelines for the Development of European Compatible MSc Programmes based on the Bologna process in Egypt [antikvár]

Introduction These guidelines intend to help the academic and academic-related teaching staff work in higher education and want to create and maintain international connections among universities involved in the Bologna process of the European higher education. In the narrow sense, this is a collection of documents that were created in a real TEMPUS CD JEP project. This project was implemented in the framework of TEMPUS III. MEDA that involved EU member countries and Arab countries. The specialty of the project was agriculture that made it even more interesting. The task of the staff involved in the project was dual. One main task was the introduction of two M.Sc. programmes by creating the linear education on the base of the experiences of the Bologna process introduced in Europe. The other task is to reveal the demand of the labour market for highly qualified experts in the agricultural sector, and to create the educational curriculum for that. Both education and agriculture are developing and changing rapidly in the EU as well as in the target country, Egypt. One of the difficulties of the project was that such M.Sc. programme has to be created which can fulfil the demand of the labour market arising after 2010 for a long term. Therefore the development goals were partly to create the formal frames of the B.Sc.-M.Sc.-Ph.D. linear training, and partly to fill this frame with content according to the demands of the agricultural sector. The project was coordinated by the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Debrecen. The other members of the consortium from the EU were the Research Institute of Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Ghent University in Belgium. The Faculty of Agriculture of Ain Shams University and the Faculty of Agriculture of Mansoura University were the Egyptian partner institutions. Before the project was started as a result of a preliminary preparation period of two years, the coordinators of the partner institutions had already had a scientific and educational connection for a long time. Two professors of Ain Shams University completed their university studies in Hungary and Poland, respectively, but several other staff members of the two Egyptian universities have graduated or taken part in study tours in different EU countries. This already existing vocational connection significantly helped filling the gaps originating fi-om the cultural differences. TEMPUS projects, similarly to other EU projects, require very thorough and detailed elaboration that involves a risk higher than the average due to the changing educational and economical enviroiunent. At the same time this relatively long preparation was the basis of the success of the project providing a solution for several difficulties. During the implementation of the project, some colleagues involved wanted to slightly modify the project tasks referring to the changing conditions. The completed tasks were reviewed by the project management represented by the preliminary determined Steering Committee which also determined the future tasks. In the meetings of the Steering Corrmiittee the technical details of the implementation of each task were formed into decisions binding on all partner institutions. During the operative implementation of the project the preparation of the mobility flows (staff retraining, management) was made difficult by the Schengen Agreement, as its bureaucratic rules required considerably more and longer preparation by the partner institutions from the non-EU member country. Another critical point was the purchase and installation of the equipment spreading across borders. Before the implementation of the educational tasks a detailed training needs analysis was carried out surveying the demands for labour and the directions of the future changes among students, professors and representatives of the economy. The joint evaluation of the results was the basis for the determination of the educational goals. To achieve the consensus in the techniques of the Bologna process was also a critical point of the project. Several misunderstanding and disinformation among the teaching staff occurred regarding the demands for a less or more