As I understand it, the tradition in the US is that it's a master of arts if it requires a foreign language competence, otherwise it's a master of science. That seems somewhat arbitrary, and I may be wrong. But that's the way the distinction has been described to me. ________________________ Sally J. McMillan University of Tennessee sjmcmill@utk.edu ----- Original Message ----- From: "Thomas Burg" <burg@donau-uni.ac.at> To: <air-l@aoir.org> Sent: Tuesday, March 05, 2002 2:29 AM Subject: [Air-l] something totally different Dear Members: I dare to ask something on the margins of this list. We at our university have to invent Master Programs that are internationally comparable. That means here in Austria we are moving from national to international systems and naming. Due to a lack of tradition we struggle with the meaning of MA and MSc programs. We cannot distinguish precisely what makes up the one or the other. Our field is that of New Media, Telematics, Knowledge Management - thus more on the production and management side. We found several programs out there that cover more or less similar contents and courses but are named MA or MSc without any comprehensible reason. Some colleagues are opting for MSc as the default label for our programs but I'm not so sure about that. Thanks for listening Thomas N. Burg, ______________________________________ Center for New Media http://www.donau-uni.ac.at/newmedia Donau Universitaet Krems Dr. Karl Dorrek Strasse 30 A-3500 Krems, Austria Fon +43-2732-893-2520, Fax -4500 Mobile: +43-699-11656971 _______________________________________________ Air-l mailing list Air-l@aoir.org http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l