International Education Week

This autumn, AACRAO staffers Julia Funaki and LesLee Clauson Eicher will be presenting sessions at the 6th annual TAICEP conference. The conference, which was originally slated to take place in Glasgow, Scotland, had to change venues because of the pandemic. Now it will be held virtually throughout the month of October.

Pronounced ‘TIE-sep’, The Association for International Credential Evaluation Professionals is a membership association that supports colleagues engaged in the important field of applied comparative education, otherwise known as international credential evaluation. TAICEP and AACRAO signed a strategic partnership because they have many points of intersection in their mission and goals to support their members.

TAICEP is a truly international organization, with members from 21 countries around the world. Since TAICEP’s creation in 2013, international credential evaluators now have a community. That community includes shared best practices and methodologies, and a common goal: the commitment to facilitating mobility by recognizing and interpreting educational credentials.

The TAICEP annual conference, which attracts about 250 credential evaluators each year, provides a small, intimate venue that facilitates collaboration, encourages standard setting, allows for networking, and gives colleagues the opportunity to teach and learn from one another.

AACRAO's presentations include:

UNESCO’s Convention on Global Recognition in Higher Education: National Approaches to Implementation.  Funaki will join Beka Tavartkiladze  from World Education Services and Marina Malgina from the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education (NOKUT ) to present a session on the Global Convention. Adopted in 2019, the Global Convention aims to facilitate the recognition of educational qualifications of individuals relocating temporarily or permanently to another country anywhere in the world.

If you’re interested in human mobility and recognition of educational qualifications, you’ll want to tune in to this session. Participants will be left with these points to ponder: What are the prospects for implementation of the Global Convention in various national contexts? What are possible pathways for implementation, particularly in higher education within Norway, Canada, and the U.S.? The session will conclude with a discussion of wider adoption of the Global Convention in Europe.

Recognition of Private Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Latin America and Anglophone Africa with Reference to Recognition in the U.S. and Canada. With so many new private HEIs springing up around the world, it can be difficult to know which ones are legitimate. At this session, Clauson Eicher, together with her colleague Martha Van Devender from Educational Credential Evaluators, Inc. (ECE), will offer tips and tricks for determining the recognition and accreditation status of private HEIs using primary resources that are freely available to international credential evaluators.

This presentation won the 2020 Sepmeyer Award for Excellence in Credential Evaluation Research.