They aim to welcome 26 million people to their three countries by 2015. A total of 13.5 million people traveled among the three East Asian countries in 2009, and their earlier goal of 17 million “intervisitations” in 2010 is expected to be achieved.

“It is significant that the three countries set a target and confirmed what must be done to that end,” Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism Minister Seiji Maehara said after signing the statement.

Furthermore, the tourism ministers jointly proposed that environment-friendly tourism be promoted to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions, Japanese officials said.

Maehara and his Chinese and South Korean counterparts urged tourism authorities in the three nations to compile an action plan to promote tourism aimed at addressing global warming, the officials said.

Under the proposal, the tourism authorities are asked to map out measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in all tourism-related activities, including transportation, accommodations and shopping, they said.

The three ministers also decided to share information related to tourism that pertained to major natural disasters and infectious diseases, the statement said.

Finally, they  agreed at the meeting, the fifth trilateral tourism ministerial meeting, to cooperate on developing and utilizing such areas as health care, sports, movies, animation and food and beverages to develop tourism.

Minister Maehara, Chinese National Tourism Administration Chairman Shao Qiwei and South Korean Culture, Sports and Tourism Minister Yu In Chon visited the Hangzhou area in Zhejiang Province for a series of related meetings that ran from Saturday to Monday.

On Saturday, China’s Shao hinted that Japanese travel agencies might be allowed to sell services to Chinese tourists headed for Japan.

“We are now preparing to revise (relevant) laws,” Shao was quoted by Japanese officials as saying to Maehara.

Maehara later said that any deal might be restricted to frequent visitors.  “Japanese companies would be able to offer a wide range of travel plans to Chinese who travel to Japan repeatedly, since they have explored the tourism routes most extensively,” he said.

Later, Maehara held a meeting with South Korea’s Yu. Maehara proposed that the two countries make efforts to increase visitors both ways by taking advantage of a plan by Japanese and South Korean filmmakers to jointly film movies next year.

Maehara, who flew to Shanghai from Tokyo’s Haneda airport earlier in the day, inspected Chinese bullet train technology firsthand by riding a train with a top speed of over 300 kph from Shanghai to Suzhou, Jiangsu Province.

“Several hundred” Chinese tourists arrived in Vancouver on Wednesday, the Canadian Tourism Commission said in a statement, after a group of 18 Chinese tourists landed in Victoria, B.C. on Monday.

Treasury Board President Stockwell Day and B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell were on hand at the Vancouver airport to officially greet one group, which included a delegation from the China National Tourism Administration.

Day said that he was “delighted” to welcome the visitors, calling it an “important day for the Canadian tourism industry.” He added that Beijing’s decision means that “doors are opening to attract even more visitors” from the East Asian country.

As China’s economy has grown, tourism there has become a hot industry, and many are choosing to travel abroad. However, a country needs approved destination status in order for China’s tourism companies to organize group tours there.

Other countries such as Australia have enjoyed approved destination status for years. In Canada’s case, the agreement comes as Ottawa’s sometimes frigid diplomatic relations with Beijing appear to be thawing.

The decision also means that Canadian tourism businesses, eager to target the growing ranks of international tourists from China, can now promote their products there.

“I think more and more people will go to Canada,” one travel agent in Beijing told CTV News. “Formerly, this would have been very difficult for them.”

According to the Canadian Tourism Commission, travellers from China injected $260.6 million into the Canadian economy in 2009.

Campbell said he expects that 10 percent more tourists to visit B.C. from China this year, and 15 percent more in 2011 and 2012.

The tourism commission believes the growth potential from Chinese visitors is enormous. More than 45 million people from China left the country in 2009 to travel. That number is projected to reach 100 million people by 2020, according to the Chinese government.

Source: eturbonews.com

After three decades of spectacular growth, China passed Japan in the second quarter to become the world’s second-largest economy behind the United States, according to government figures released early Monday.

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The milestone, though anticipated for some time, is the most striking evidence yet that China’s ascendance is for real and that the rest of the world will have to reckon with a new economic superpower.

The recognition came early Monday, when Tokyo said that Japan’s economy was valued at about $1.28 trillion in the second quarter, slightly below China’s $1.33 trillion. Japan’s economy grew 0.4 percent in the quarter, Tokyo said, substantially less than forecast. That weakness suggests that China’s economy will race past Japan’s for the full year.

Experts say unseating Japan — and in recent years passing Germany, France and Great Britain — underscores China’s growing clout and bolsters forecasts that China will pass the United States as the world’s biggest economy as early as 2030. America’s gross domestic product was about $14 trillion in 2009.

“This has enormous significance,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It reconfirms what’s been happening for the better part of a decade: China has been eclipsing Japan economically. For everyone in China’s region, they’re now the biggest trading partner rather than the U.S. or Japan.”

For Japan, whose economy has been stagnating for more than a decade, the figures reflect a decline in economic and political power. Japan has had the world’s second-largest economy for much of the last four decades, according to the World Bank. And during the 1980s, there was even talk about Japan’s economy some day overtaking that of the United States.

But while Japan’s economy is mature and its population quickly aging, China is in the throes of urbanization and is far from developed, analysts say, meaning it has a much lower standard of living, as well as a lot more room to grow. Just five years ago, China’s gross domestic product was about $2.3 trillion, about half of Japan’s.

This country has roughly the same land mass as the United States, but it is burdened with a fifth of the world’s population and insufficient resources. Its per capita income is more on a par with those of impoverished nations like Algeria, El Salvador and Albania — which, along with China, are close to $3,600 — than that of the United States, where it is about $46,000.

Yet there is little disputing that under the direction of the Communist Party, China has begun to reshape the way the global economy functions by virtue of its growing dominance of trade, its huge hoard of foreign exchange reserves and United States government debt and its voracious appetite for oil, coal, iron ore and other natural resources.

China is already a major driver of global growth. The country’s leaders have grown more confident on the international stage and have begun to assert greater influence in Asia, Africa and Latin America, with things like special trade agreements and multibillion dollar resource deals.

“They’re exerting a lot of influence on the global economy and becoming dominant in Asia,” said Eswar S. Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell and former head of the International Monetary Fund’s China division. “A lot of other economies in the region are essentially riding on China’s coat tails, and this is remarkable for an economy with a low per capita income.”

In Japan, the mood was one of resignation. Though increasingly eclipsed by Beijing on the world stage, Japan has benefited from a booming China, initially by businesses moving production there to take advantage of lower wages and, as local incomes have risen, by tapping a large and increasingly lucrative market for Japanese goods.

Beijing is also beginning to shape global dialogues on a range of issues, analysts said; for instance, last year it asserted that the dollar must be phased out as the world’s primary reserve currency.

And while the United States and the European Union are struggling to grow in the wake of the worst economic crisis in decades, China has continued to climb up the economic league tables by investing heavily in infrastructure and backing a $586 billion stimulus plan.

This year, although growth has begun to moderate a bit, China’s economy is forecast to expand about 10 percent — continuing a remarkable three-decade streak of double-digit growth.

“This is just the beginning,” said Wang Tao, an economist at UBS in Beijing. “China is still a developing country. So it has a lot of room to grow. And China has the biggest impact on commodity prices — in Russia, India, Australia and Latin America.”

There are huge challenges ahead, though. Economists say that China’s economy is too heavily dependent on exports and investment and that it needs to encourage greater domestic consumption — something China has struggled to do.

The country’s largely state-run banks have recently been criticized for lending far too aggressively in the last year while shifting some loans off their balance sheet to disguise lending and evade rules meant to curtail lending growth.

China is also locked in a fierce debate over its currency policy, with the United States, European Union and others accusing Beijing of keeping the Chinese currency, the renminbi, artificially low to bolster exports — leading to huge trade surpluses for China but major bilateral trade deficits for the United States and the European Union. China says that its currency is not substantially undervalued and that it is moving ahead with currency reform.

Regardless, China’s rapid growth suggests that it will continue to compete fiercely with the United States and Europe for natural resources but also offer big opportunities for companies eager to tap its market.

Although its economy is still only one-third the size of the American economy, China passed the United States last year to become the world’s largest market for passenger vehicles. China also passed Germany last year to become the world’s biggest exporter.

Global companies like Caterpillar, General Electric, General Motors and Siemens — as well as scores of others — are making a more aggressive push into China, in some cases moving research and development centers there.

Some analysts, though, say that while China is eager to assert itself as a financial and economic power — and to push its state companies to “go global” — it is reluctant to play a greater role in the debate over climate change or how to slow the growth of greenhouse gases.

China passed the United States in 2006 to become the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, which scientists link to global warming. But China also has an ambitious program to cut the energy it uses for each unit of economic output by 20 percent by the end of 2010, compared to 2006.

Assessing what China’s newfound clout means, though, is complicated. While the country is still relatively poor per capita, it has an authoritarian government that is capable of taking decisive action — to stimulate the economy, build new projects and invest in specific industries.

That, Mr. Lardy at the Peterson Institute said, gives the country unusual power. “China is already the primary determiner of the price of virtually every major commodity,” he said. “And the Chinese government can be much more decisive in allocating resources in a way that other governments of this level of per capita income cannot.”

Source: The New York Times

The idea is to use the 500 million user base to act as a virtual advice clinic and call centre of issues as mundane or important as the curious would like. Facebook Questions could become a significant new process by which people obtain tips and advice about destinations and travel products. Questions can be answered by anyone (risky, as the example below will demonstrate).

So how does it work?

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In the same way that users push status updates to their Facebook profile, members can place a question directly into the system from their profile page.

For this example the question was: “I’m looking for a great hotel in Rome, can anyone help?”

After sending in the question, the system puts the user on a landing page where much of the functionality can be added and where answers will eventually (and hopefully) fly in.

The user can do a number of things even after the question is live…

Add a poll:

Check out related questions or topics:

Or, arguably the most important, send the question directly to people who you think may know the answer – primarily so that users can take a view from what the wider Facebook membership has to say and those in your Facebook circle.

There are also some other handy editing tools for the user, including adding a picture. But it is the person that answers the question who has a lot of room for creativity.

The answer section allows users to add links to external websites (SEO folk: apparently URLs are no-follows), which means that companies as well as individuals can spend time mining Facebook Questions for relevant topics and getting involved.

Nevertheless, complaints around Q&A systems such as these often highlight the lack of quality in some of the answers, as this example illustrates:

Very early days for Facebook Questions, but the opportunities are there for individuals and businesses to effectively become helpful sources of travel information to the wider Facebook community (500 million and counting) and friends.

The next logical step is to allow integration of the Facebook Questions tool into company fan pages on Facebook and, as TripAdvisor showed albeit in a different way, onto existing websites.

Source: tnooz.com

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Speaking at the opening session of the 8th National Conference on Tourism Futures (Brisbane, Australia, 5-7 July 2010), Mr. Rifai commended the recent launch of Australia’s National Long-Term Tourism Strategy which promotes investment in the industry, facilitates growth and maximizes employment opportunities. “By bringing tourism into the Cabinet, Australia has acknowledged the importance of the sector to the national economy,” said Mr. Rifai. “Australia’s National Long Term Tourism Strategy is a clear recognition of tourism’s capacity to foster economic growth and social development,” he added. 

The combined efforts of the Australian public and the private sectors meant that while global tourism declined by 4% in 2009, international tourist arrivals to Australia were much in line with volumes of previous years, argued Mr. Rifai. Looking to the future, he encouraged Australia to take further advantage of its geographical proximity to Asia, without losing its traditional European and North American markets. “As shown in the latest edition of the UNWTO World Tourism Barometer, Asia and the Pacific is currently leading the recovery process,” Mr Rifai told delegates.  

Mr. Rifai also met with Martin Ferguson, Minister for Resources, Energy and Tourism, who expressed his firm belief that tourism is increasingly a central focus of the Australian Government’s agenda. “Tourism is very much part of Australia’s future and will be the life blood of many local communities” said the Minister. “The tourism industry of Australia has contributed AUS$ 41 billion to the national economy and employs nearly half a million Australians”. 

The two parties also discussed recent trends in many countries to increase taxation aimed at reducing public deficits, in particular the UK departure tax for long-haul outbound travellers, which will impact destinations such as Australia and New Zealand. They agreed to work together in order to prevent new trade barriers of this nature to expand. 

In addition, Mr. Rifai attended various other meetings including a briefing in Brisbane with industry leaders and senior tourism officials and a Leaders’ Boardroom Luncheon in Sydney attended by senior board members of the Tourism and Transport Forum (TTF). Meeting with private and public representatives he praised Australia’s track record of sustainable and responsible tourism development and discussed issues such as the positioning of tourism in the Green Economy.   

June Issue of the UNWTO World Tourism Barometer: http://www.unwto.org/facts/eng/barometer.htm

UNWTO Roadmap for Recovery: http://www.unwto.org/pdf/roadmap_EN.pdf

Source:  UNWTO

Instead, at this school and at thousands of schools across China, nearly 10 million youngsters, most of them high school graduates, began the gruelling three-day college entrance examination.

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The annual ritual, formally known in English as the National College Entrance Examination, is popularly known in Chinese as the gaokao or ‘high test’.

In Shanghai, as elsewhere, the gaokao is a city-wide effort. Parents put aside other matters to feed, meet and drop off their offspring. Taxi drivers declare exam-takers will have priority for their services. Even the municipal government pitches in, providing special arrangements for the students.

On the stretch of Kangping Road where students enter the No 54 Middle School examination venue, traffic police installed roadblocks to prevent speeding traffic. A board informed commuters they were in an exam zone and to please help out by keeping silent.

An ‘exam economy’ has quietly emerged in recent years: students are offered psychological tutoring, special meals and hourly-rate rooms by some opportunity-seizing businessmen.

By 5pm on Tuesday, a 100-strong posse of silent, anxiously waiting parents had taken over the stretch of Kangping Road and, in some cases, mothers and fathers came along.

A bright red banner across the gates announced the examination was in progress. As students finished, they trickled out looking dazed, drained and a little self-conscious. Parents craned their necks to find their young. Somebody took a picture.

One young woman, Meng Ke, e-mailed on Tuesday: “I’m in the middle of the big test as I’m writing and I still have one history test tomorrow. Tiresome but you get a strange ceremonial feeling, like, maybe I’m never going to have the chance to do another ugly maths paper in my whole life.

“This feeling might also be generated from the society’s tremendous attention to gaokao. It makes the headlines for three whole days on newspapers and TV. The city government sends extra police forces, and god, look at the faces of the never-been-so-nervous parents!”

Meng said: “gaokao is our life. A typical Chinese senior student virtually doesn’t have a life apart from this, we almost don’t learn anything new and don’t take any other ‘irrelevant’ classes, interests or social events apart from the four subjects – Chinese, English, maths and a choice of our own.

“Senior year means tonnes of mock tests and practices and one, two, three rounds of reviewing. Our original class [groupings] are divided and new ones are formed based on the subject choices we made. As for the younger students who just entered high school, they’re freer but they all know somewhere the gaokao is waiting.”

Those who have done the gaokao look back on it with horror. An office worker, who asked not to be named, said: “Thank god I don’t have to go through that again.”

She said it was the most stressful thing she had done in her entire school career. In fact, in the 10 years that had passed, she had not gone through anything as stressful.

“In preparation, for three years, I woke up at 6am and went to bed at 9pm. I took only two days off a month. The pressure from parents and teachers was enormous.”

One recent college graduate, who now works as a news reporter, said that for the 10 years she was in school, the gaokao was the solitary goal of everything people did.

“We used to say that in Chinese schools, you work your ass off until high school and then play in colleges. And in the US it’s the opposite.

“For my own high school, the No 1 High School, attached to the East China Normal University, a pretty good city key school, we had a building called the senior building. You moved into that building once you entered the 12th grade. And we called that building a prison.”

For people who want to enter a college, the gaokao affects everything in their life. But as China changes, loosens and opens up, the gaokao’s impact is changing too.

Although 9.57 million students sat the examination this year, that is 650,000 fewer than last year and the second year the numbers have dropped, the China Daily reported, citing the Ministry of Education.

This is because of the falling birth rate from China’s one-child policy, the paper said. There had also been a jump in the number of students who could afford to go overseas to study instead.

MyCos, a Beijing-based higher education consulting firm cited in the China Daily, said the number of students going abroad rose to around 220,000 in 2009, up 50,000 students compared with 2008.

“Every year the number of students taking the gaokao is dropping,” Wang Huiyao, Vice-chairman of the China Western Returned Scholars Association, said from Beijing. “The Ministry of Education controls all universities, this stops innovation and creativity… school autonomy is the key.”

Education reform is urgently needed and Wang suggested the gaokao be held as many as six times a year, so students could pick their best results.

Universities need more rights to pick the students they want, he said. The entrance requirements, too, should be based on other criteria such as a personal statement prepared by the student, reference letters from teachers and the student’s extracurricular activities.

Local universities are already finding new ways to compete for the best brains in the pool.

Meng wrote: “I think a major change that I observed might be that the prestigious colleges in China have used different methods other than gaokao to select their students.

“This year as I know, Fudan University is admitting 500 students in Shanghai on its own with high school recommendations, an encyclopaedia-style test and interviews. Also these students still take gaokao, they just have to pass the ‘college line’.”

The latest draft of education reform, according to the Xinhua news agency, proposes to introduce diversified channels for colleges and universities to enrol students rather than using the gaokao results exclusively.

Xinhua said that enrolment through recommendations by high school principals and the institutions’ own examinations would also be considered.

Source: University World News

Under the deal, the UK education and publishing company takes control of 39 schools operating under the Wall Street English brand name, which last year enrolled more than 35,000 students. Pearson already runs a number of English language teaching centres in China under the Longman brand name and plans to retain the Wall Street English brand but share marketing, customer support, technology and back-office services between the two groups.

John Fallon, Chief Executive of Pearson’s international education business said that the company plans to make China central to build its position as a global provider of English language teaching services. “Wall Street English helps to establish Pearson as a major player in one of the most exciting and dynamic education markets anywhere in the world,” he added.

Pearson plans to set up more Wall Street English schools in China and expand its provision of Pearson’s English language assessment tests. A spokesperson for WSI said that combined sales at its China schools were expected to reach US$70 million in 2009.

Source: Language Travel Magazine

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There are three big advantages to studying in the United States. The first is money. Vast sums are invested in research and development on American campuses, which are already much better endowed than their British counterparts. This doesn’t just mean more free drinks events; it also means having the resources to carry out expensive top-level research that leads to breakthroughs and publications, be it in healthcare or rocket science.

The second advantage is choice. There are 1,700 institutions in the United States offering postgraduate qualifications – that’s 10 times the number available in the UK. These opportunities aren’t just offered at the famous private American universities such as Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but also at the country’s great state universities like the University of California, Maryland and Michigan (the three most common US state university destinations for UK postgraduates last year). Others – such as the University of Oregon – specialise in becoming world leaders in particular fields of expertise.  

The third benefit of a stint in the States is the chance to stand out in the jobs market. Margaret Bray, a member of the economics department at the London School of Economics, who works on PhD admissions, has had jobs in both the US and the UK. “When graduates come to me for advice, I tell them to consider the States very seriously,” she says, “It depends what you’re studying, of course, but in general it’s better not to do your postgraduate degree in the same place as your undergraduate one. It’s good to get exposed to new people and to new ideas.”  

According to Bray, US universities are more likely to offer better quality careers services. “American universities see helping PhD students into employment as a big part of their role,” she says. “Lots of letters and references are written, and they have faculty members and websites dedicated to supporting people into the academic jobs market. The LSE offers all of that, but in general this help is less formalised than it is in the US.”  

So if the United States offers all these benefits, what’s the catch? There are, of course, some drawbacks. Tuition fees are not cheap in America, and it costs an average of £20,000 ($30,000) a year for living and tuition costs (although applicants are advised to check online for details on particular universities, which tend to vary). These costs add up, particularly when you take into account that American postgraduate degrees take four or five years to complete.  

On top of that, you may have to sit some American entrance exams (which, for the top universities, can be time-consuming and expensive), complete international application forms and meet the additional stresses associated with visas and international travel. Cultural adjustments can also be more difficult than might be expected for a country that speaks your own language.  

But these problems are not insurmountable. Viral Gandhi, 25, is now half way through his PhD in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and the fine education he’s getting hasn’t cost a penny. “I applied for financial support, and now they cover my tuition fees and provide me with a $23,500-a-year stipend,” he says. “That kind of funding is hard to come by in the UK, and Harvard is an excellent brand name. If I wanted an academic job, I’d probably get a better one having been at a US institution – and the facilities here are crazy.”  

Gandhi says that he didn’t find the application process too harrowing. “There is a separate application for each university. But the Harvard application wasn’t too bad. You need to take the GRE [Graduate Record Examination], which is a maths and verbal test that isn’t too difficult. You need a few references. And you need to write a personal statement explaining why you want to do grad school there. But it’s not that hard.”  

Jennifer Hepworth, 24, has also just successfully applied to Harvard for an MBA, and managed to pick up the Kennedy Scholarship on the way, a fund which covers all tuition fees and living costs, and is open to individuals applying to Harvard and MIT.  

Hepworth has this advice for applicants. “One thing I was very aware of when making my applications to American universities was trying to find my American ‘voice’,” she says. “Brits tend to naturally cultivate a kind of faux humility and understate their achievements, whereas Americans are far more direct in championing themselves. I tried to keep this at the front of my mind when writing my [application] essays, reasoning that, if they didn’t make me squirm with discomfort when I re-read them, they probably wouldn’t stand up against the competition. I’ve ended up with essays which make me nauseous, but the admissions committees seemed to like them!”  

In the US, universities receive high levels of funding from the state and private sector for conducting research. A significant proportion of this funding goes towards bursaries, which students receive in return for taking part in a specified piece of research, or for committing to teach for a certain number of hours a week. This is different to the UK, where scholarships tend to come through research councils rather than universities, and are reserved almost exclusively for the most high-performing candidates.  

According to Bray, these different methods of funding could explain why PhDs tend to take longer in the States. “In the US, many supervisors have an incentive to keep on strong PhD students who are coming to the end of their degree, because they have become experts who can boost their publication records. In the UK, the research councils target PhD completion rates, so there is more pressure on everyone to complete a PhD in good time.”  

Because most of the funding in the US is tied to research, scientists and engineers tend to get an easier ride than arts and humanities scholars. One of the few institutions offering funding for all fields is the Fulbright Commission. This prestigious institution is expected to fund 50 British students going to the US next year, and 50 Americans going the other way. Although the closing date for next year’s entry is now over, the organisation offers a year-round advice service to any student wishing to study in the US. Lauren Welch, head of advising, says she encourages students of all backgrounds considering this path to get in touch.  

“Studying in the States is a chance to set yourself apart, no matter what your field of study,” she says. “Surveys of the top 200 employers say they really value international experience, and international student visas allow you to stay on for a year or more to work in the US. These international experiences give students transferable skills, knowledge about another culture and a broader world view.”  

The Fulbright Commission has more information for British students who are thinking of studying in the US. Visit fulbright.co.uk for more details.  

Alexander Rees, 24, is a British fashion graduate taking a Masters in magazine writing at New York University (NYU) in the United States on a Fulbright scholarship. 

“When people think about studying in the US, they tend to think of the old-fashioned stereotypes: the Ivy Leagues, the fraternities and sororities, the keg parties, the big sports games. But that’s not representative at all – there’s a whole range of things you can do in America.  

I started at NYU in September, and it’s fantastic. The breadth of courses is much wider here. If I wanted to, I could take a whole range of classes and jump about different departments. There are so many options I want to take, I haven’t had a chance!  

I did my undergraduate degree at the London College of Fashion, but I’ve still got city shock – New York is a 24/7 place and there are always things going on. I’ve met a really interesting group of people – we have study groups and hang out. There are a couple of other international students, but most are American.  

When I finished my undergraduate degree in London, I knew that I wanted to write about fashion and design, and I was told that a postgraduate degree would help my prospects when jobs were tight. I had already been to the top institution in the UK, and coming to the US offered me a chance to extend my CV. There is no way I could have afforded it without the Fulbright scholarship.  

American students aren’t expected to specialise at undergraduate level like they do in the UK, so when you get to the postgraduate stage you’re expected to have quite a broad knowledge of everything. There’s also a lot of pressure to do internships. That’s a bit of a problem for me, as my visa restricts my ability to work – I’m a bit worried I won’t be able to make the contacts others will.  

I’d definitely recommend studying in the States, though. It’s been a fantastic experience, and much more valuable than studying for a postgraduate degree in the UK. It’s made me confident about dealing with a different culture. Everyone seems more able to sell themselves out here, and you can learn from that.  

The downsides? I get flummoxed that I can’t buy certain British products, and American cookies aren’t as good as British biscuits! Seriously though, it’s really expensive, particularly at NYU because it’s a private university. Coming here as an international student is also tricky – you have to ship all your stuff over or buy it here, and then you have to find an apartment. But that’s only a problem for the first month.” 

Source:  The Independent

The program to revamp the existing academic structure is part of a 25-year strategy to develop the higher education system in Saudi Arabia, with aims to support its burgeoning development and job market requirements, said ASF Karim, CEO of Edutech, a leading educational solutions and services provider.

“Saudi Arabia’s considerable education budget this year provides a significant boost to the Kingdom’s regional academic standing and will benefit teachers and students alike in the short term and the state in general amidst this continuous movement towards further growth,” Karim noted.

In line with this, Edutech has pledged its support for the Kingdom’s efforts to develop its human resources by delivering pioneering eLearning solutions, he added.

According to him, the overhaul of the education system will raise the demand for innovative, technology-driven learning solutions to back several key projects in some of the newer universities in the Kingdom.

Saudi is among the regional countries shelling out considerable percentages of their annual budgets towards achieving qualitative improvements to educational infrastructure in the recent years.

At present, Saudi Arabia is pumping SR11.8 billion ($3.1 billion) into a project, which aims to promote overall development among students through increased knowledge as well as growth in their physical, professional, psychological and intellectual capabilities.

Amidst the country’s announced plans to build more schools in 2010, Edutech has identified the potential in offering its industry-leading and proven effective eLearning solutions, which promote 21st century teaching and learning across the region.

“Saudi Arabia’s considerable education budget this year provides a significant boost to the Kingdom’s regional academic standing and will benefit teachers and students alike in the short term and the state in general amidst this continuous movement towards further growth,” Karim said.

“This latest development also opens up an excellent opportunity for us as a leader in delivering technology-driven learning solutions to bring new-age tools that will promote the culture of interactive learning with more targeted results. We have several new products to introduce to the region, and Saudi is among the top markets we are eyeing for these latest innovations in eLearning technology.”

With the domain, technology and execution experience to address educational institutions’ present requirements, Edutech has established a strong presence in the Saudi Arabian market, having completed a number of massive implementations for some of its most important colleges and universities in the country, Karim stated.

This includes a recent integrated eLearning implementation for King Khalid University, and the deployment of industry-leading software, hardware and other interactive tools for Effat College (Jeddah), KFUPM Schools (Al Khobar), Al Andulas Schools (Jeddah) and Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University (Al Khobar).

At present, the company is working on several key projects for some of the newer universities, such as Taiba, Taif, Hail, Jizan and Najran, he added.

Source: Trade Arabia

“Yet again the importance of Travel & Tourism, and the influence it has on nearly every facet of our lives, has gone unappreciated by governments,” says Jean-Claude Baumgarten, President & CEO of (WTTC).

Governments should be working together, with all sectors of the industry, to identify ahead of time measures to ensure the sustainable growth of an economy that represents 9.2% of world GDP and employs 235 million people.

Although the effect of the volcanic ash cloud continues to lessen and a more reasonable approach to airspace restrictions is now being implemented, many travellers remain stranded overseas. The Travel & Tourism industry is still suffering from the loss of business, plus the cost of repatriating its customers, and it will be some time before it returns to normal.

It is still too early to assess the full economic impact of the problem, but there is likely to be serious implications for all sectors. Legislation that could help the industry recover and grow is controlled through many different places and sometimes restricts trade rather than benefits it.

An important step forward, says Baumgarten, would be the introduction of centralised air traffic control for the whole of Europe, which could reduce the need for blanket bans on flights in the future.

“It is time,” Baumgarten continues “that the European Commission gets its act together, stops regulating misshapen fruit, and starts creating consistent legislation for an industry that can truly benefit the world’s economies as we come out of recession.”

WTTC is urging the world’s leaders to collaborate with the leaders of private-sector organisations and understand what can be done to ensure the health of the industry in the 21st century.

Source: Adventure Travel News