November 19, 2014, by Deepa Kumari Veerasingam
U21 ECR Workshop: The Future of International Higher Education [Part 1]
In commemoration of its 10th anniversary, the University of Nottingham China Campus hosted a Universitias 21 (U21) interdisciplinary workshop on the future of international higher education. The workshop was held on 1st November 2014 with over 60 people in attendance, including two of our PhD students who won the travel prize competition. The competition which was held in September 2014, asked early career academics and PhD students why they think they are the best fit for the travel prize and how their interest/research fit the U21 workshop.
Here is what one of the winners, Liu Haixia, a first year PhD student from the School of Computer Science, had to say about her experience from winning the travel prize competition.
It is my honour to be one of the representatives from the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus (UNMC) to attend the U21 Workshop: the Future of International Higher Education in the University of Nottingham China Campus (UNNC).
I would like to share my experience from this workshop by making connections between several speeches, to show to readers that the disrupted elements (interdisciplinary education, internationalisation, etc.) are not isolated from each other. Problems in one element might invoke thoughts within other elements. Therefore, the disruption of traditional education model requires unveiling and solving problems from many aspects.
Professor Yang Rui (Hong Kong University), a leading expert on international education, delivered a thought-provoking speech on the need for east Asian universities to develop pedagogic and administrative models which draw heavily on cultural and intellectual resources from their own countries. Professor Yang further reiterated the importance of English language from an internationalisation point of view.
Gao Yuan (University of Melbourne), gave a presentation on benchmarking institutional internationalistion performance in regards to the development of international education. The topic was further discussed in reference to the previous presentation by Paula de Barba (University of Melbourne) entitled “Virtual Learning: Massive Open Online Courses – MOOCs”. It is interesting to wonder how to define a framework of university internationalisation under the context of MOOCs?
I have been enlightened by this workshop and I started to think how to integrate different cultures, different hard/soft approaches to adjust our existing education system to suit the development if international higher education in today’s increasingly dynamic education industry.
Haixia [front row, first from the left]
We would like to thank the UNMC Provost, Professor Christine Ennew for providing the opportunity for Haixia and Chong Yew to represent the postgraduate community of UNMC at the workshop in China.
Cheers!
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