The development trends of the main drivers for attracting students into the tertiary education sector in Latvia – distance learning and internationalization

Abstract

The European Union (EC-JRC, 2010), has stressed that higher education must change and adapt to economic and social needs, that institutional change is essential to educational innovation, and that information and communication technologies (ICT) must form part of the teaching and learning process. The second international challenge is to encourage international cooperation between institutions in order to share knowledge across borders and facilitate collaboration (Morin, 2009) and post-cosmopolitan citizenship (Dobson and Bell, 2006). The dramatic decrease of the number of students in Latvia in the last 10 years by 64% and disproportionally high number of HE institutions, makes Latvia’s Government, the Ministry of Education and Science and higher education institutions to look for new ways to structure and optimize the processes in the higher education sector. The main research question of this paper is: the general development trends of the main drivers for attracting more students into the tertiary education sector in Latvia by means of online education and internationalization. The relevance of the research: the authors review the intersections of the distance learning and internationalization as the optimal solutions for the critical situation in the Latvian higher education sector with lack of students.