The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) began an ambitious reform of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq's (KRI's) kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12) education system beginning in 2007 in an effort to modernize the curriculum, upgrade school facilities, and raise the quality of instruction. In 2010, RAND was asked to conduct a one-year study to assess…

Final Year Projects (FYPs) play a significant role in undergraduate education in the computing field of study, and most of the related university departments and schools consider them an essential contribution to this study. However, issues such as whether to assign the projects individually or to a group of students, the procedures followed in…

The pursuit of higher education symbolizes a profound and transformative journey, particularly for international students who embark on the path of studying abroad. This dissertation undertakes an in-depth exploration of the well-being of Arab women pursuing their graduate studies in the United States (US), emphasizing four crucial dimensions of…

This paper sets out to evaluate a proposed twelve-month programme of development aimed at academic staff at a new university in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. The author uses a model of cultural difference proposed by Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede as her starting point. Reference is also made to the work of other researchers and to the…

The rapid advance in technological tools and their expansiveness, has made their impact on different aspects of life undeniable. Education has also been a field in which technology has found a fertile ground to grow. Technology has made education much easier for both teachers and learners and provided a more autonomous and amusing ambiance for…

This paper examines tensions in implementing human rights education (HRE) in schools in Kurdistan-Iraq, both for teachers and for policy-makers, juggling nation-building and its application through schooling and child rights. We draw on documentary sources and fieldwork in two governorates, including classroom observations and interviews with…

This paper reports on two different strategies that have been implemented in Iraq to improve quality assurance in the higher education sector in Iraq. One strategy has been developed by the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in Baghdad. It involved conducting a pilot study at the University of Babylon. This pilot included…

As the Syrian civil war enters its fifth year, with over four million refugees and no solution in the near future, the international community must better consider long-term planning in regards to the plight of refugees and services to support them, not just short-term emergency responses. Critically, higher education is all too often ignored when…

This paper addresses the faculty perception on web-based instruction in order to explain the nature of learning and instruction in this setting. Using a mixed method approach, the research studied a sample of 132 University Faculty (lecturers and professors) in University of Kurdistan. The research tools were interview and questionnaire. The…

In the past few years, developing small cities, by promoting villages to towns for instance, has been considered as one of the main policies for improving the Quality of Life(QoL) in the rural regions of Iran and with this aim in the last few decades, a large number of rural centers have been promoted to towns. The purpose of this research is to…

The current study aimed at investigating the nature of EFL teachers and learners' perspectives on the intercultural competence potentiality of an EFL textbook, i.e. "Top Notch Series," which is used extensively in Iranian institutional EFL context. To this end, forty EFL teachers and eighty-eight advanced EFL learners from private…

This paper explores the idea that student-centred learning (SCL) is a concept and an approach that is internationally useful and transferable to a range of higher education settings. We present details of a British Council funded collaborative project between Hawler Medical University (HMU), in Erbil in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq and…

This is a research case study of an International Higher Education Partnership (IHEP) between Vanguard University of Southern California (VUSC) and the University of Duhok (UoD) in the Kurdistan Region of northern Iraq funded by the British Council DelPHE-Iraq project targeting Millennial Development Goal (MDG) #3 to promote gender equality and…

In the morning when a child walks into a classroom, he should feel a sense of belonging. In simple terms, this defines the world of "us-ness," a concept that noted educator and new media expert, Professor Stephen Heppell says plays the most important part in designing a new learning facility. Heppell advocates a critical assessment of the needs of…

This article outlines certain problems and challenges facing the qualitative researcher who enters fields that are either extremely difficult to access or potentially hostile towards outsiders. Problems and dilemmas in such contexts are highlighted by reference to fieldwork research among PKK (Kurdistan Worker's Party) guerrillas in North…