ACA European Policy Seminar on Internationalization Audits

Internationalization Audits: Assessing and Improving Institutional Strategies
Brussels, Belgium
March 23, 2012

Internationalization has come a long way in the past three decades, but the business of internationalizing higher education is by no means finished. Internationalization must now improve in quality to serve different institutional aims and objectives, and better reflect the rapidly changing multipolar higher education world order, in which Western universities and colleges continue to play an important but no longer exclusive role.

In reaction to this need, a wide range of "internationalization audits" have been developed in recent years. These instruments are all devoted to the evaluation and the improvement of institutional strategies for internationalization. The aim of this seminar is to present the most important and relevant of these, and to analyze their respective merits and possible downsides. Most of the audit tools presented are based on external review, but some are self-evaluation and self-assessment exercises. While some of them have been developed for use across the globe (or an entire continent), others target the institutions of one single country. Some take a comparative approach, i.e. they engage in mutual benchmarking, while others are strictly non-normative and measure institutions exclusively against their self-set aims and aspirations.

With this seminar, ACA intends to contribute to the enhancement of quality internationalization in Europe and beyond. Participants will be in a position to identify their "ideal" tool for quality improvement from among the instruments available, or to construct their own self-assessment methodology. Once again, ACA has been able to enlist the leading specialists from the field, among them Eva Egron Polak of the International Association of Universities (IAU), Adinda van Gaalen of NUFFIC, Rolf Peter of the German Rectors' Conference (HRK), and Will Archer of i-graduate, to name a few.

For more information and to register, please visit: www.aca-secretariat.be/index.php?id=575.