“The internationalization of higher education is inevitable,” Mr. Levine, a former president of Teachers College at Columbia University, said in a speech on Wednesday to the Association of International Education Administrators whose members are meeting here this week.
In internationalization, “some bold universities will lead,” Mr. Levine said. “Others will be populizers. And others will hold onto the past and will be destined to fail.”
via “Internationalized Academe Is Inevitable, but Its Form Is Not,” The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The quotation above is from a short version of a longer article the was published in the February 26 print edition of the Chronicle. A recurring point of tension at that meeting, and one that is also clear from the comments on the report linked above, is that there is a tension between the need to internationalize curricula and the costs of doing so. Like so many sectors of the economy, higher education is experiencing significant financial challenges and this is the problem.
It is easy enough to come up with a strategy for internationalizing the university. Pretty much everyone would agree that the best way to do so would be through lots of direct international exchanges. Send students to study abroad and send faculty or graduate students to do research and to participate in international conferences. It would also be helpful to make it easier for international scholars and students to do the same by coming here. In addition, facilitate cultural exchanges of poets, artists, dancers, playwrights, actors, filmmakers, writers, critics, musicians and other cultural figures. This can be as important as the exchanges of physicists, chemists, physicians, political scientists, historians, geologists or other scientists natural and political scientists. Culture is the basis for the kind of understanding that may avoid the kinds of unnecessary conflicts that arise from innocent offenses in violation of cultural norms and it is helpful to exposed students to that of other cultures.
The problem, of course, is that this is an incredibly expensive proposition. Even with the efforts of the Obama administration to encourage international education through some increased funding and through clearing up the arbitrary post-9/11 visa and immigration hurdles that did little, if anything, to enhance our national security, intellectual and cultural exchange across borders and oceans is still costly and challenging. Nonetheless, we can and must continue to do it. In fact we need to step up efforts.
Still, no matter how noble the intentions or how dedicated the efforts, it is doubtful they will be enough. We will never have the funds or the capacity to allow everyone who wants to or who should have direct experiences with foreign cultures to do so, and as long as this is the case, we’ll continue to build toward a crisis.
I’m not using the word crisis flippantly and I am not talking about something that will only impact the educational sector. I am talking about something that will have implications far beyond those institutions “destined to fail,” the faculty and staff who will lose jobs when they do, and the students who will eventually realize how poorly served they have been. If the education sector fails to internationalize, it will affect the entire nation in terms of our economic competitiveness, our moral stature and perhaps even the vibrancy of our democracy.
Technology can help us avoid this crisis in a number of ways. There have been exciting developments in decades. Bandwidth has become cheaper and connections more reliable. At the same time the capabilities of a typical personal computer have also increased, enabling new kinds of collaboration, whether it is a video conference bringing together folks in any two rooms with connected computers with direct video connections or in virtual spaces using digital avatars. Now it is even possible to simultaneously work together on the same copy of resources using applications such as Google Docs, SharePoint, or other application sharing utilities, even when one’s interlocutors are thousands of miles away.
That points us to a a second important and exciting development, that of cloud computing. It’s easier to work together when you’re using common software that is shared in the cloud, because it provides a common standard. Everyone is using the same version of the same software, and not pirated copies, or other programs that are supposed to be compatible, but too often aren’t. Using software in the cloud can also help collaborators to work around challenges posed by patents and copyrights that can vary from country to country. Depending on configuration and hosting, it might even help to avoid censorship under authoritarian regimes. Even better, a lot of what is available in the cloud can be used at no charge. Use Google Docs instead of locally installed Office apps, use Dropbox for networked storage of files, or use Picassa to store, share and edit images (not endorsements, just examples).
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To my mind, however, the most exciting development is that we are seeing areas of the world that have, until recently, had very poor connectivity come online. Maroc telecom, for example, is in the process of connecting to the Internet several West African nations south of the Sahara. Violent conflict remains the single most significant stumbling block to connecting those who are not already connected all over the world, but the fact that Africa, once the world’s most poorly connected continent, is being wired, however slowly, is cause for joy. It is now possible to interact with people in places where it hadn’t been possible before.
There are other technologies that will also become relevant, ranging from machine translation to the digitization of text and images, but I’ll leave those for another day. Given my background in translation studies, I’ll probably go off track with that one anyway. If we make use of these technologies, we can offer all members of the campus community some level of experience with foreign cultures, even if we are not able to provide them with direct experience in overseas setting.
We can also better integrate the experiences of students who are able to study abroad into the curriculum, rather than having it feel like something separate detached from the rest of their time in college. We can improve experiences by better preparing students, faculty and staff for experiences abroad, and facilitating their re-entry upon return. We can also use their experiences for the benefit of those who will not be able to have them for whatever reason.
For example, the person teaching comparative religion course is unlikely to have had extensive experience in cultures of all religions the course covers. Perhaps the students on study abroad programs in countries where those religions are being practiced can share their experiences with the class back on campus synchronously through videoconferencing, or asynchronously through a blog, podcast, photos, or an online threaded discussion. What if a political science professor, instead of trying to explain changing views of American foreign policy in Europe, could allow students to follow it being discussed on a European discussion board and then talk about it with them in class? What if the process of preparing students and scholars from American institutions to go abroad, or those from foreign institutions to come here, could be turned into a learning experience for other people at the host and home institutions even before and after the actual exchange? What if some of the things that college students already enjoy doing online such as social networking, chatting, sharing their lives, could be used for pedagogical purposes?
All of this is possible; some of it is already being done, but the really exciting thing is that because of the technological developments listed above, and because every 21st-century campus already has some sort of technology infrastructure, a lot of it can be done with very little extra investment. What is needed is planning, coordination, and to know-how. But, this is new territory with few trailblazers to follow. And with the financial restraints so many campuses are dealing with at the moment, innovation is not high on their list of priorities, no matter what the potential benefits might be. And with that I’ll drop the needle on my broken record.
Technology is the agent of globalization, and we should also avail ourselves of the tools it provides when we teach about its processes. I
t has always been technology that has brought different cultures into contact with one another. The process has included the snowshoe and cave paintings, the reed boat and smoke signals, the locomotive in the telegraph, the jet plane and the telephone, space travel and the Internet, and it will continue through teleportation and who knows what. As was made clear by the meeting of international education administrators, higher education recognizes the need to teach students about globalization and their place within increasingly interdependent economies and societies. And yet, this is where the record skips and I repeat myself. Higher education, particularly the humanities and social sciences, have been too slow to embrace technology as a pedagogical tool for teaching about the process of globalization itself and about the many other fascinating cultures on this planet.
Ultimately they will have to. But to paraphrase Mr. Levine, it’s a matter of who will lead, who will follow, and who will be too late.
N.B. It may well be that some of the campuses that take the lead on internationalization will not be the ones that take the lead on using technology to do so. As a result their effort will be more costly and less effective than it could be.