We have been thinking about internationalising the learning experience for a while. Most teachers tend to depend on the existence of international students in their classes to engage in any form of internationalisation experiences, personally I rejoice when I see students from as many diverse backgrounds in my class, however, most teachers don’t do internationalisation very well, and I would argue that most do it extremely poorly.
To internationalise the learning experience, a classroom does not necessarily need international students in them. To start to really engage in internationalisation initiatives, teachers need to change their own thinking, as teachers and academics, we need to re-think what we do? Why we do what we do? And more importantly how do we assess what we get our students to do in our classes? Most higher education educators tend to be over protective over what we do? A good example here is students’ inability to mix and match subjects from different institutions. Just putting internationalisation aside for a while, in order for higher education to remain relevant it needs to re-think everything we have done previously. For example, some of the disruptive trends like micro-credentials, badges, online, just in time qualifications, etc. will require higher education institutions re-think their approaches. In most cases these disruptive trends will require institutions to open up and engage with external entities. Now if we are serious about internationalising the learning experiences, we need to look at it in a similar way as many of the other disruptive trends, many of the future ready skills are indeed developed through internationalisation. We want students to interrogate concepts and ideas that are embedded in different cultural contexts, negotiate differences in values, language and expectations and develop solutions that are respectable and inclusive. These are high level skills that should be embedded in all curriculum that needs to remain relevant for the disruptions that higher education institutions are facing. Naturally understanding the importance of these skills, and how to develop and assess them is the hardest part. Think about group work, most academics use them but very few assess it effectively, and therefore the focus is lost on the important skills that is develop through that process. By opening up our courses we can identify problems that are located in different cultural contexts, perhaps in different geographical locations. Students can be required to identify and define those problems and develop solutions that is culturally sensitive to the location of the problem. Some of these approaches will require to lose some of the control that we tend to have on our courses. These processes develop important internationalisation skills, and therefore assessments regimes should focus more on the processes than the outcomes. It is extremely important to re-focus on exactly what we want to do when we internationalise the curriculum and be prepared to change our own thinking before we can try to change our students’ thinking.
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December 2019
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Photo used under Creative Commons from Philippe Put