Internationalisation in and of higher education: contexts, concepts and contentious issues (SRHE seminar)

Wednesday April the 29th I attended a workshop arranged by SRHE (Society for Research into Higher Education)

Three very different and very interesting presentations framed the seminar and opened up for multiple perspectives on the internationalisation in Higher Education debate. As an special consultant at Roskilde University, DK in the professional academic development unit, one of my jobs has been to come up with an internationalisation strategy for the unit. As was also illustrated by the presenters on this occasion, one of the hurdles when working with internationalisation, is to move the inhabitants of the institution away from the misconception that having international staff and having international students is the same as being internationalised. Some of the - for me - most interesting themes for discussions were:

- What happens when recruitment agents become educators?

- What if the barrier is less about language and more about Literacy?

- What does time mean in terms of education, and what is digital time in HE?

- What happens to digital learning if time is not individual but a collective construct?

- Are MOOCs really as open and available as they set out to be? (what happens if you live in a sanctioned country, or if you don't have access to electricity in the hours you need to?

- What does internationalisation MEAN?

- Why are institutions doing it? Is it the Money? or is it part of the mission of HE? Or sth else

- What kind of citizenship is required / expected / seen amongst staff and students studying/working within internationalised agenda? Cosmopolitan citizen? Globalised citizen? Inter cultural citizen?

and MANY more:

I made three illustrations of my take on the event. I hope you enjoy...

Internationalisation as a lens on the marketisation of higher education Professor Anna Robinson-Pant, University of East Anglia As UK universities have increasingly had to seek external sources of funding, internationalisation has been seen almost exclusively as a means of sustaining revenue. As a result, most universities have now established an ‘international office’ primarily concerned with international student recruitment. Drawing on her research in this field over the past ten years, Professor Robinson-Pant argues that internationalisation can provide a lens for analysing the influence of marketisation on dominant practices and values within UK universities. She shares insights from recent research projects focused on the academic experiences of international master’s students as they made the transition into UK higher education, and on international student recruitment agents, in order to explore how we can move beyond what has been termed the current ‘mono-cultural’ model of internationalisation. Internationalisation and the digital Philippa Sheail, University of Edinburgh  This paper considers theoretical approaches to revisiting the idea of the international student in relation to online ‘distance’ education and the digital university. Troubling the notions of ‘home’ and ‘host’, it draws upon Dall’Alba and Barnacle’s (2005) work on ‘embodied knowing’ in an online context, and Sidhu and Dall’Alba’s (2012) analyses of ‘(dis)embodied cosmopolitans’ in international education, in order to consider what it is to be an international student in the digital university. An analysis of the 2014 controversy around country sanctions and export restrictions imposed by the US export authority on Coursera, the MOOC (massive open online course) platform provider, is presented to support the argument that we need to address the discourse of ‘smoothness’ in the marketing of online education. The intention of this paper is to move towards opening up new ways of thinking about internationalisation and the digital, by first recognising the complex and effortful practices of making education international (after Lin and Law 2013).  Internationalisation and Higher Education – have we lost sight of what it’s all about? Professor Sue Robson, Newcastle University       Globalisation, the knowledge economy and advances in technology have influenced and intensified the internationalisation of higher education (HE). Internationalisation has become a key strategic imperative in many HE institutions, with a strong focus on mobility and recruitment and international collaborations for research and programme delivery. While a marketisation discourse may be inevitable in the current HE funding climate, this has created heightened international economic competition and growth in the for-profit sector, trends that are likely to endure long beyond the economic crisis. Brandenburg and De Wit (2011, 2012) ask whether we’ve lost sight of what it’s all about. There is a danger that economic imperatives steer thinking away from the radical reassessment of HE purposes, priorities and goals that internationalisation requires. In this seminar paper, Professor Robson considers different perspectives on internationalisation and whether a focus on its social, cultural and values-driven goals can lead to more acceptable conceptualisations of internationalisation, or indeed ‘create a set of potent heuristics for generative theorization’ (Odora Hoppers, 2009).