Internationalisation in and of higher education

Internationalisation in and of higher education: contexts, concepts and contentious issues

April 29, 2015

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).