This study examines how Chinese and Western news media covered artificial intelligence (AI) privacy issues in higher education from 2019 to 2024. News articles were retrieved from Nexis Uni. First, non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) was employed to identify core AI privacy topics in university teaching, administration, and research. Next, a time trend analysis investigated how media attention shifted in relation to key events, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the emergence of generative AI. Finally, a sentiment analysis was conducted to compare the distribution of positive, negative, and neutral reporting. The findings indicate that AI-driven proctoring, student data security, and institutional governance are central concerns in both Chinese and English media. However, the focus and framing differ: some Western outlets highlight individual privacy rights and controversies in remote exam monitoring, while Chinese coverage more frequently addresses AI-driven educational innovation and policy support. The shift to remote education after 2020 and the rise of generative AI from 2023 onward have intensified discussions on AI privacy in higher education. The results offer a cross-cultural perspective for institutions seeking to reconcile the adoption of AI with robust privacy safeguards and provide a foundation for future data governance frameworks under diverse regulatory environments.

Thailand's shift towards a competency-based curriculum faces practical challenges in implementation. This research aims to examine the roles of school administrators in driving competency-based curriculum and their influence on teacher's ability to implement it in teaching and learning management. The research employed a two-phase approach: interviews with school administrators and teachers in Bangkok on methods used in applying for said competency-based curriculum, and the quantitative part, followed by a survey collected from 112 school personnel from 4 schools in Thailand. Thematic analysis was used for phase 1, while descriptive statistics, t-test, and multiple regression were used for phase 2. The study found that school administrators' roles in leadership, teacher development, and curriculum support significantly influence teachers' ability to manage competency-based teaching, with curriculum support showing the strongest effect (β = 0.354), followed by development (β = 0.295) and leadership (β = 0.177).

One of the major reasons expounding the persisting decline in students' academic achievement and high drop-out rate at the secondary education level in Mauritius, despite the implementation of several educational reforms including the current 'Nine Years Continuous Basic Education' (NYCBE), is that reforms are often developed using a top-down approach with limited grounding into the voices of stakeholders. It is in this perspective that this study, underpinned by the 'general system' theory, uses a two-phases 'sequential exploratory mixed methodology' to capture the voices of different stakeholders to develop a Structural Equation Model (SEM) that showcases the correlations between key contextualised factors and students' academic achievements. The first phase, with a qualitative approach, identified the contextualised factors affecting students' academic achievement in Mauritius, by analysing data derived from 'Focus Group Discussions involving 16 participants, representatives of different educational stakeholders. The second phase, with a quantitative approach, developed a SEM using data collected from 600 students, captured through a survey questionnaire. The generated SEM, with a good fit indices, did not only depict greater impacts of school leadership, followed by student factor, tuition teacher factor, school teacher factor and socio-economic factor respectively on the academic achievements of secondary students, but also showcased the mediated effects between the factors, advocating for a holistic approach to improve school effectiveness in Mauritius. This study provides key information informing policy makers, educational specialists, and school administrative on the way forward towards improved school effectiveness.

Our education community of learners, teachers, leaders, managers, providers, researchers, policymakers, together with the business community and other stakeholders, are all, and without any exception, here and elsewhere, in a dire learning-teaching, managing, and decision-making situation with the crisis from the COVID-19 pandemic. This abstract provides a brief from the Reaching Out ALL (ROA) initiative which maps the extent to which the needs and implications of Distance Education and Digital solutions may, with and without success, address COVID-19 impacts on education, locally, institutionally, nationally, and globally. COVID-19’s divide is of great concern for the successful and effective implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and SDGs No.4, Quality Education, in particular. Educational actions reaching down the everyday learning-teaching contexts and conditions locally, nationally, and globally cannot be treated in the total absence and isolation of the direct voices and concerns, i.e., from those actual beneficiaries, partners, and targeted audience of our educational sector, from primary/basic up to the higher/university levels. This is the uniqueness of this present and ongoing global online survey. Its very purpose is in gathering the most updated and relevant empirical information and data on the impact of COVID-19 on education with a view to mapping the urgent and pressing needs for distance education and digital solutions. Can COVID-19 create new possibilities to mitigate the Divide in education, or does it just the contrary? Let us get from the direct voices. Mapping the improvements and/or shortcomings both prior to, and during COVID-19, on the access and quality of education offered, will assist the educational community in their choice of the most effective distance education and digital solutions The ROA initiative, which is introduced above, is based upon the collection, analysis and interpretation of data and information from an ongoing 3–5-minute Global Online Survey (GOS) on COVID-19 Impacts on Education. GOS was first launched in January 2021 worldwide, and will end by the end of April 2021 in several languages, namely English, Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Arabic, Tigrinya, Bulgarian, and many other languages. The GOS survey is carried out by Stockholm University, Sweden, and its international partners. Distance education and digital solutions alone, can neither be of quality nor be effective, if the direct voices of the education community (learners, teachers, managers, researchers’ policymakers, providers, and parents, and so on) are neither heard and nor put into implementation. The COVID-19 Global Online Survey is an important, if not, a most vital initiative to reach this goal making education equally accessible, inclusive with quality, and sustainable through empirical evidence for relevant and appropriate informed decision-making and implementation.

This paper analyses the contextualised determinants affecting the academic achievement of secondary school students in Mauritius. A mixed methodology was used to understand the effect of the determinants on students’ achievement considering the academic progression of learners from one point (CPE: Examination marking the end of primary schooling) to another (NG9A: Checkpoint assessment after three years of secondary schooling).  The first phase had a non-positivist epistemological stand using the qualitative method of ‘focus group discussion’ to identify the determinants and then validate the TIMSS questionnaire. The second phase had a post-positivist epistemological stand where an amended version of the standardised international questionnaire TIMSS was administered to collect data from a sample of 600 students. The primary data were analysed to produce a Linear Multiple Regression Model. The findings reveal that 90.1% achievement can be explained by the variables of school leadership, student, socio-economic factor, and teacher (R square = 0.9.1; p < 0.05).  The model shows that school leadership has a higher positive correlation on (β=0.419) students’ achievement followed by student factor (β= 0.227), tuition teacher (β= 0.154), school teacher (β= 0.117) and socioeconomic status (β= 0.048).