The development of a new Internationalisation Strategy will give us the opportunity to provide focus and direction for our international activities, recognise and reinforce the successes of the University’s achievements, ensure a proactive and strategic approach to collaborations and alliances and develop a genuinely international culture within the University community and with our external stakeholders.
In order to develop an internationalisation strategy we need to answer the following questions:
At the time of writing, we are in the final approval stages of the University’s International Student Recruitment Strategy and International Partnership Strategy. These represent two of the three constituent parts of the Internationalisation Strategy, the third being our International Mobility and Experience Strategy. Once approved, we will communicate these internally as widely as possible, and I apologise in advance to those who will inevitably get to hear them over and over again.
Recruitment
In terms of recruitment, our principal objective is to build on the University’s historical success, meeting the University’s annual international revenue targets whilst ensuring compliance with UKVI regulations. Each element of this is critical - in particular we must ensure that our activity is compliance-led to safeguard the long-term success of the institution. A huge amount of work has gone on behind the scenes already this year to meet that goal.
Along with other universities, we have experienced a small boom in international recruitment since the end of 2021, due to the pent-up demand created by the global pandemic and the lack of alternative options in other Anglophone destinations. Although that demand is unlikely to be sustained beyond September, it has highlighted the need to better resource our international office to match the University’s recruitment aspirations. We have over the last five months undertaken a reorganisation of the International Office, which will increase the number of front line staff in Admissions and Compliance, and also put a clearer structure in place for career development. Despite that distraction and any number of other challenges, the IO team delivered the second-largest January intake for a decade and also held our first post-pandemic on-campus international welcome event for them, which was fantastic to see.
International Office and Partnerships
We have also undertaken a physical reconfiguration of the International Office space so that we can welcome colleagues from the Centre for Academic Partnerships into our new shared home. The University’s overseas partnerships offering has expanded considerably over the years, and we are reviewing this provision to ensure that it all meets the University’s objectives (and that we meet those of our partners). The new International Partnerships Strategy will also lay out a framework for our future ambitions, whether for more students progressing to study here at Bedfordshire, more studying overseas with our TNE partners, or broader ambitions around building our global reputation.
We have also put in place new oversight on recruitment and partnerships, in particular, to give the faculties a stronger voice in both areas and ensure that our approach is truly collaborative, and I hope that anyone, staff or student, with an interest in Internationalisation, now feels welcome to come and engage with us.
There are a number of other changes we’re in the process of proposing or implementing – registration for the US loans system, reviewing our international preparatory programmes, proposals for international scholarships and rationalising our agent network to improve performance. All of this is designed not just to meet our key objectives, but to diversify the countries from which we recruit our students, broaden the range of subjects they study, and increasing the number of international students at the Bedford Campus, to make studying at Bedfordshire a truly global experience.
Global Higher Education has always had its challenges. We’ve seen changing patterns of demand and delivery, higher student expectations, changing employer needs and increasingly rigorous government regulations and immigration controls. We can now add to this a global health pandemic, increased volatility in the global marketplace and Brexit. These are all placing a significant burden on all players within the academic environment – schools, colleges and universities – and the communities and countries in which they are placed.
It is certainly a lively time to be joining the University of Bedfordshire as Interim Pro Vice-Chancellor International.
But if there is one thing that we have learnt from the current Covid-19 crisis, and from our responses; if there is one thing that we realise we cannot do without, it is each other. The situation has brought home to all of us the power and the pivotal need for cooperation, collaboration, and partnership – all at the very heart of any definition of internationalisation.
Yes, most of us have become, literally, more locked into our local environment. We may not be travelling as much or as far, we may not have been able to physically meet, but we have found other ways to compensate for that in the short term. People will always need to be mobile. There will always be the need for physical travel, for physical real-time interaction in a shared environment, but we may in some situations do this less often and avail ourselves of the marvellous digital opportunities in front of us.
There has been perhaps an inequality perceived within internationalisation. That for education it is about a weaker partner being helped and assisted or controlled by a more dominant one. But Covid-19 has highlighted to us all that importance is a word that we should not apportion lightly. Who have we needed at this time of crisis? What have we needed? Who has been important to us? Yes, the top researchers are vital as they work, across their national and international boundaries, on a vaccine for the human race – not a small act – but so too are the doctors, the nurses, the teachers, the shop workers, the fruit pickers, the waste disposers and so many more.
Over the coming months, we will all be working together to shape and develop our new Internationalisation Strategy. This will give us the opportunity to define what internationalisation means for Bedfordshire, describe the contribution international activities make to the achievement of the University’s academic strategy, recognise and celebrate the success of our current international activities and ensure a proactive and strategic approach to our future endeavours.
Many of the values we seek to encourage in our students as they move to be global citizens are values of empathy towards others, the desire to learn more about the world and to work together to combat the challenges of our world – values that are at the heart of internationalisation. In this age of ongoing global crisis, we need more than ever to embrace these values.
The current paralysis of globalisation has never been witnessed in written history and certainly not by global emergencies such as major wars, in fact globalisation was arguably accelerated by the two major world wars of the 20th century which witnessed large movements of people and products at unprecedented scales around the world.
Many of our generation of university colleagues involved in the international outreach of universities have always assumed that globalisation is an inevitable force and the internationalisation of universities an undisputed part of this increasing porosity across national barriers. However, there are many problems with this assumption. Universities are not like globalised companies that can move their headquarters, supply bases and workforce wherever suits them. Universities are almost always tied into their national environment through a network of dependencies such as funding and regulation. They may well establish bases overseas, but these come at enormous cost to universities and are almost always subservient to their home base. Threats to mobility therefore strongly threaten universities’ claims to being global in outlook.
The barriers to internationalisation of higher education long predate Covid-19 and were rising before this extraordinary crisis froze global mobility in its tracks. The last few years have witnessed the resurgence of national frontiers as the war on terror, the rise of populism and protectionism threw spanners in the free flow of people and ideas across borders. We see these barriers in many forms. The more visible are stricter visa regimes, taxes, health requirements as well as concerns of censorship in many countries we deal with on a daily basis. But there are many more less visible barriers such as the increasing prevalence of cautious risk assessment which has taken hold in universities as a prerequisite for any international trip or student exchange or a more intrusive regulation of higher education delivered through transnational means, which has tended to homogenise the offer and stultify creativity.
While travel has been dramatically impacted and reduced, as a result of Covid-19, engagement and interaction has increased. Increased constraints surrounding student mobility have led to an increase in domestic action and activity and with increasing concerns over borders, identity, freedom of movement and treatment abroad, the future of international exchange and movement is perhaps in doubt. Internationalisation at home has long been an issue however and perhaps, this is where the resilience and sustainability of internationalisation lies. When faced with crisis, adaptation is necessary, but there is also an opportunity for reflection and review of what is at the core of internationalisation; what it means, and how it can best be sustained.
A major change during the pandemic was the use of, and indeed reliance on, online communication. There have long been issues with the use of online teaching and learning, ranging from access, equity, capability, pedagogy and formal recognition. Within a period of roughly 24 hours, the education sector went from viewing online learning suspiciously to wholeheartedly accepting it as an equal form of teaching and learning. While this is somewhat misguided, it does demonstrate an ability to adapt and evolve. Online learning has provided opportunities for international interaction; marked an increase in online course offering; and seen a plethora of free content and webinars offered – usually across multiple locations and time zones – all of which work towards supporting and promoting internationalisation.
The internationalisation of higher education at institutional, regional and national levels has matured over the past decade. Ten years ago, if an institution had an International Strategy, it would have invariably focused solely on the recruitment of international students to the UK, with a reference to very little else. They have evolved over time and while the term ‘internationalisation’ is now widely used, it is open to interpretation. John Hudzik defines it as "a commitment, confirmed through action, to infuse international and comparative perspectives throughout the teaching, research and service missions of higher education. It shapes institutional ethos and values and touches the entire higher education enterprise." Hudzak goes on to claim that it "not only impacts all of campus life but the institution’s external frames of reference, partnerships and relations".
Even though our initial responses to Covid-19 and local lockdowns appeared to result in a retrenching and a move away from the international environment, the pandemic itself has served to remind us just how important international cooperation is. Viruses are not respecters of local or national boundaries. In the race for a vaccine, although there has no doubt been an element of competitiveness, we have witnessed one of the most impressive and unifying global efforts, ever.
What might all this mean for the development of our new Internationalisation Strategy?
We need to develop a holistic, systemic approach to internationalisation, seeing it as the responsibility of the whole institution and not just one or two teams. One of the ways in which this will be achieved is by embedding it within our new strategic framework and narrative of the institution. This framework would form part of the institution’s efforts to bring about cultural change in the organisation and ensure that we are best placed to respond to the challenges faced by higher education and the wider society.
This approach will enable us to do a number of things:
The development of our Internationalisation Strategy gives us the opportunity to recognise and reinforce the successes of the University’s current international activities and achievements, provide a platform on which we can strategically engage with key international countries and regions, review and reflect on what we are delivering and how, and enable us to develop a genuinely international culture within the University community.
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