Experts in the field of international education spoke about new trends and the future of physical and virtual student mobility
This year, global international higher education system has changed significantly, rapidly reorganized to online. How have the traditional processes in the world changed? How much did the experience of Russian universities mirror the international practice? How did international education experts’ interactions help to choose the right strategy and operative solutions?
This year, Department for international development has intensified its interaction with the international expert community in the sphere of higher education internationalization. This cooperation reached a qualitatively new level in 2020. Thanks to that, we gladly present you the opinions and conclusions about the outcomes of the year by Hilligje Van’t Land, Secretary General, International Association of Universities (IAU), and Giorgio Marinoni, Manager, HE and Internationalization policy and projects, International Association of Universities, which they shared in an article written specially for the RANEPA website.
Hilligje Van’t Land, Secretary General, International Association of Universities (IAU), and Giorgio Marinoni, Manager, HE and Internationalization policy and projects, International Association of Universities.
The pandemic has changed the landscape significantly.
The immediate negative effects on international education include: border closures, limitations to mobility, closure of campuses. All of them had a major impact on internationalisation. As shown by the results of the first IAU Global Survey on the impact of COVID-19 on Higher Education (Marinoni, van’t Land & Jensen, 2020), conducted by the International Association of Universities in March - April 2020, 89% of the 424 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) that responded to the survey worldwide reported an impact on international student mobility and this impact was negative. HEIs had to face situations of international students grounded at their institutions or at foreign institutions, international students deciding to interrupt their study programmes, and cancellation of student exchanges all together.
The same negative impact could be observed for research, again looking at the IAU survey, 80% of HEIs reported a negative impact, with scientific research conferences cancelled or postponed (at 81% of HEIs), International travel cancelled (no more visiting professors, no missions abroad, etc.) (at 83% of HEIs) and even with scientific research projects in danger of not being successfully completed (at 52% of HEIs), and in some extreme, but not negligible (21% of HEIs) cases, research even completely stopped.
At the same time, universities around the world very quickly developed new approaches to internationalisation and develop online activities to compensate the lost opportunity to attend classes and undertake research abroad; they developed virtual international mobility schemes and they still opened registration to international students to travel abroad as soon as rules and regulations and international travel will resume. Research networks mobilised online opportunities to continue their work; new international research dynamics were invented and developed in particular around the COVID 19 vaccine research.
The effects of the pandemic were not only negative. In fact, the whole academic community demonstrated great resilience and sense of reactivity. HEIs dealt with the emergency relatively successfully all over the world and the pandemic accelerated transformations, which were already in act, but not yet implemented on a large scale. The typical example is the shift to online learning, which in the field of international education means virtual exchanges and collaborative online learning (COIL). In the IAU survey these activities increased by 60% of HEIs. Considering that the data of the IAU survey refer to March-April, it is expected that today this percentage is even higher.
A positive effect of the increased use of technology has been the opening up of new opportunities for partnerships and collaboration. In fact, online collaboration removes barriers due to distance and travel restrictions and offers new possibilities of partnership among HEIs.
Last but definitely not the least, the pandemic has reinforced the social role of higher education, it has demonstrated to society the importance of science, research and education.
The COVID-19 pandemic is at the same time a great challenge and a great opportunity for international higher education. By disrupting mainly the student mobility dimension, the pandemic has questioned the dominant competitive model of internationalisation which rationale is basically economic.
The pandemic opened up the opportunity to rethink internationalisation, to address its limits and to correct its problems. Among them, inequality, which is intrinsic to a model of internationalisation based only on student mobility (only 2.5% of the whole student population can benefit from a mobility period), commercialisation of and competition in research (research agendas set by funding organisations, risk of having only the best resourced HEIs engaging in research, multiplication of efforts and waste of resources in pursuing the same research objectives with no collaboration).
HEIs have an opportunity to engage more in internationalisation of the curriculum/at home, to focus on international/intercultural/global learning outcomes for all graduates, to strengthen collaboration in research, to address the global challenges the world faces: pandemics, such as COVID-19, but also climate change, energy production and consumption, waste management, food resources, poverty and migration, all aspects which are interlinked.
The pandemic offers an opportunity to reorient internationalisation in the light of the United Nations Agenda 2030 for sustainable development and its associated Sustainable Development Goals, to make it more equal, fair and inclusive, as stated, for instance, in the call of the Network of International Education Associations (NIEA, 2020).