Internationalisation of Business Education: Meaning and implementation

The internationalisation of business has been one of the most prominent features of the second half of the twentieth century, with its pace and breadth touching all elements of the value-adding network. In this environment, the higher education sector has been revising its aims and objectives to incorporate an international dimension to the skills and knowledge development of students. However, interpretation of the educational challenges posed by internationalisation in the form of guidelines that specify how the curriculum might be internationalised, is in its infancy. Despite early efforts, little work has been done to translate this trend into a developmental overview of curriculum delivery. This paper begins by synthesising the literature regarding globalisation, curriculum internationalisation and student learning in higher education. It seeks to bridge the gap between the aims of curriculum internationalisation and the subject curriculum. It applies well-accepted educational principles to the task by presenting a three-stage typology of business curriculum internationalisation. These stages are international awareness, international competence and international expertise. Directions for further research are also provided.     

Negotiating knowledges abroad: non-Western students and the global mobility of knowledge

Taking the Institute for Housing Studies in Rotterdam as a case study, this paper aims to theorise the ways non-Western, international students construct and negotiate knowledges in Western institutions of higher education. It describes the types of knowledges these students identify as characteristic of their learning abroad, distinguishing between the curriculum, knowledge of cultural Others and ‘critical thinking’, and the strategies of incorporation, avoidance and resistance with which students negotiate these knowledges. These knowledges, if contested, are then theorised to facilitate these students’ entry into, and mobility within, globally dispersed epistemic communities.     

Designing an internationationalised curriculum for higher education: embracing the local and the global citizen

In this article, differing interpretations of the internationalisation of higher education curriculum are explored analysing the structural and cultural aspects of the curriculum. Voices of tertiary staff from around the world taking part in a four-week, fully online course, entitled ‘Internationalising the curriculum for all students’ contributed to stimulating discussions that raised many questions about whose perspectives were being privileged in defining an internationalised curriculum and what constituted a transformed curriculum. In this analysis, the framework illuminates the varied theoretical and practical stances towards an internationalised curriculum. It highlights that indigenous knowledges and the positionings of marginal and diaspora peoples have been widely overlooked in internationalisation of curriculum practices, and these perspectives need to become integral to discussions of future tertiary education policies and curricula.     

Revealing conceptual understanding of international business

This study aims to identify an adequate approach for revealing conceptual understanding in higher professional education. Revealing students’ conceptual understanding is an important step towards developing effective curricula, assessment and aligned teaching strategies to enhance conceptual understanding in higher education. Essays and concept maps were used to determine how students’ conceptual understanding of international business can be revealed adequately. To this end, 132 international business students in higher professional education were randomly assigned to four conditions to write essays and to construct concept maps about an international business research topic. The conditions were: essay alone, essay after concept map, concept map alone, and concept map after essay. An assessment rubric was used to assess the breadth and depth of students’ conceptual understanding. Results show essays are the most adequate approach for revealing conceptual understanding of international business. In particular, concept maps revealed fewer facts and less reasoning than essays. Essays written after concept maps were less effective than essays, possibly since students perceived these essays as redundant. Further research is suggested on how educators can foster conceptual understanding.     

‘Keeping up with the time’: rebranding education and class formation in globalising India

This paper investigates the emergence of ‘internationalised’ schools as a form of middle-class aspiration in Kochi, India. It complements recent literature on the growth of international schools catering for host country elites, and shows how private schools are actively engaged in extending the aspiration for internationalised education among the city’s middle classes. The article shows how internationalised schooling has penetrated beyond Indian metropoles into secondary cities. It provides a detailed ethnographic account of how a private school has rebranded itself as an ‘internationalised’ school, involving the introduction of new practices and the repackaging of the school’s old nationalist project.     

Learning,using and exchanging global competence in the context of international postgraduate mobility

The paper offers a theoretically grounded analysis of international postgraduate students’ perspectives on the importance and development of global citizenship knowledge and competences while they are studying, and how these are valued and enacted afterwards. It draws on a series of interviews with non-Western international postgraduates during their studies in the UK and upon return to their home countries. It uses the concepts of social and cultural cosmopolitan competences as a framework to discuss the perceived benefits of educational mobility, and the possibilities and limits of social connectedness and openness in the internationalised university environment.     

Developing the reflective practitioner: placement and the ways of knowing of business and accounting undergraduates

This study aims to identify how students' epistemological beliefs or ways of knowing (comprising cognitive, intrapersonal and interpersonal aspects) develop during work-based placement. Data comprise 32 semi-structured interviews with 17 business and accounting students at a UK university. Findings show that the taking of responsibility is the key stimulus for development: intrapersonally through a changing sense of self and interpersonally though changing relationships with others. A lack of cognitive development appears to arise from a student focus on how they participate within the workplace, rather than on their workplace practice. These findings support the need for a connective view of the curriculum: strengthening connections between formal (university) learning and informal (placement) learning, and between ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ development. In particular, there should be an emphasis on the student's ability to identify relationships between work experience, the knowledge and skills that underpin practice, as well as the context of participation.     

Measuring business process learning with enterprise resource planning systems to improve the value of education

Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP) are very large and complex software packages that run every aspect of an organization. Increasingly, ERP systems are being used in higher education as one way to teach business processes, essential knowledge for students competing in today’s business environment. Past research attempting to measure learning business processes with ERP has been inconclusive and lacking in rigor. This paper reports on a comprehensive research study that uses a critical realist approach to measure business process learning from experiential ERP. Using a business simulation game as a proxy for understanding business processes, students from a US undergraduate program in three separate classes, one using ERP experientially, are assessed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The data analysis uncovers a causal mechanism for learning, complemented by an understanding of the factors that trigger or suppress that mechanism in particular cases. The results validate the efforts of those using ERP in the classroom, and reaffirm other educational business school endeavours to teach business processes, with educational implications as follows. First, before attempting to learn business processes, students must have an understanding of core business concepts. Second, hands-on experience of ERP systems indeed helps students understand business processes. Third, students are showing that they can use the knowledge gained in university classes and apply it to making business decisions. Fourth, students should be encouraged to use all information possible for making business decisions instead of relying on their personal understanding of today’s current market or on their own business intuition.     

浅析建构主义教学原则在高职《国际商务谈判》教学中的运用

随着我国经济的迅速发展,国家不仅需要专业人才,更需要高素质的应用型人才。国际商务谈判是培养学生商务专业技能,提高国际商务专业理论水平和应用能力的课程。然而,综合性与应用性较强的《国际商务谈判》课程如何能使自学能力较弱的高职学生充分吸收枯燥单调的谈判理论知识并在实践操作中脱颖而出,从而培养高职学生的专业基础知识和实践操作能力是高职《国际商务谈判》课程教师一直探讨的问题。本文将从建构主义教学原则入手,探讨其在《国际商务谈判》课程中应用。     

International mobility of PhD students since the 1990s and its effect on China: a cross-national analysis

ABSTRACT

Of all the levels of education, doctoral education is the most internationalised. By selecting one key indicator (the proportion of international students among a country’s doctorate recipients), the article presents an analysis of PhD students’ international mobility. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, many barriers to the international mobility of PhD students were removed, leading to an even larger flow of students. From 2000 to 2012, the international mobility of PhD students reached a new peak, with a significant increase in the percentage going to Japan, France, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and Australia. Nowadays, China has become the largest source of international doctoral students. In that process, a number of excellent students go abroad to study for foreign doctoral degrees. On one hand, the loss of excellent students is harmful to China’s PhD training system, but on the other hand, it is a great opportunity for China to change brain drain into brain gain by making full use of the knowledge diaspora scattered around the world.     

‘Capitalising’ on community? Understanding and critiquing instrumentalist approaches to Indigenous schooling

This paper provides insights into non-Indigenous teachers’ efforts to engage proactively and productively with students to enhance their learning in a predominantly Indigenous community in northern Queensland, Australia. Drawing upon notions of ‘funds of knowledge’, forms of capital as part of community cultural wealth, Critical Race Theory, and ‘whiteness’ studies, the research explores and challenges how white teachers draw upon community as a form of ‘capital’ to enable them to foster their students’ learning. These efforts to ‘capitalise’ on community reveal the school as a site of struggle for genuinely inclusive educational practices. These struggles were evident in: teachers' and school administrators’ ostensive care about their students but struggles to translate this into robust expectations as part of a genuinely inclusive curriculum; the cultivation of social and cultural capital to learn about the nature of the communities in which teachers worked but a tendency to deploy such knowledges for more instrumentalist reasons as part of their engagement with both the ‘official’ curriculum and Indigenous students; and, a desire and capacity to develop connections between community cultural capital and more dominant forms of capital but in ways which do not adequately foreground Indigenous epistemologies as curriculum. The research reveals teachers’ efforts to develop understandings of community cultural wealth and the funds of knowledge within communities, but also how their understandings were partial and proximal, and how subsequent social and teaching practices tended to instrumentalise Indigenous perspectives and insights.     

‘Get Foot in the Door’: International Students’ Perceptions of Work Integrated Learning

Work-integrated learning (WIL) is regarded as an important vehicle to assist students’ development of relevant professional skills, knowledge and attributes that can enhance their employability. WIL arrangement for international students is a challenging issue for institutions, international students themselves as well as other related stakeholders. While there is an emerging body of literature that examines WIL for international students, how the value of WIL is perceived by this cohort is little known. This paper responds to this dearth of the literature by exploring the different meanings that international students in the vocational education and training sector attach to WIL. Using Bourdieu’s thinking tools of capitals and habitus to interpret interview data from 105 international students, this paper shows that WIL is seen to not only add value to student learning, career aspiration and employability but also transform and enhance their symbolic and social capitals. The paper underscores the instrumental, symbolic and developmental meanings that international students associate with WIL. In particular, it highlights the reciprocal relationship between students’ development of vocational ‘being’ and personal ‘being’ through WIL.     

The way collaboration benefits vocational students: a case study of a joint venture college in China

International collaborations in the vocational and training (VET) sector have grown significantly in the past three decades in China as well as in other parts of the world. Despite its growing prominence, it remains a largely under-researched field compared to the large volume of research on universities’ internationalization. In particular, it is unclear how internationalization practices improve vocational students’ academic and social competencies and readiness for employment. This case study was intended to fill this current gap in the literature by investigating a selected joint venture VET college in China. This study employed a wealth of data as evidence that international programmes could benefit vocational students in their English skills, professional knowledge, intercultural competence, and personal and career development. In additional to the opportunities created for vocational students, international programmes are expected to offer workplace experience and design a curriculum that suits students with different future plans. The findings of this study indicate that international collaborations in the VET sector have the potential not only to better prepare vocational students for life and employment, but also to address the challenges facing the VET system in developing economies.     

Internationalisation of the higher education curriculum in criminology: a role for the southern criminology project

Contemporary issues of global significance for criminology include transnational crimes and relative inequality. To equip higher education students to become global citizens who can contribute to solutions, internationalisation of the curriculum is essential. This paper documents the process of a first cycle of internationalisation of the criminology curriculum. As an emerging paradigm, southern criminology provides direction for the process. The paper critically reflects on the institutional and disciplinary contexts at an Australian university. It evaluates the extent to which the materials for a core theory unit reflect an internationalised curriculum and outlines next steps to be undertaken. This documented process highlights southern criminology as a valuable lens through which to identify knowledge gaps and plan personalised professional development. It acknowledges the need to engage in ongoing cycles of internationalisation and make improvements in response to new resources and knowledge. The paper invites further discussion and examples of approaches to internationalisation.     

PowerPoint,habits of mind,and classroom culture

In lecture halls, in secondary school classrooms, during training workshops, and at research conferences, PowerPoint is becoming a preferred method of communicating, presenting, and sharing knowledge. Questions have been raised about the implications of the use of this new medium for knowledge dissemination. It is suggested PowerPoint supports a cognitive and pedagogical style inconsistent with both the development of higher analytical thinking skills and the acquisition of rich narrative and interpretive understanding. This paper examines how PowerPoint invites and seduces educators to reshape knowledge in particular ways, and subsequently how this knowledge is presented to students in the classroom. The particular forms of knowing, relating, and presenting with PowerPoint are decided in part by teacher habituation to the software tool’s default patterns, but also by the very nature of the presentation medium itself.     

中外合作大学课程国际化状况的调查研究——以宁波诺丁汉大学为例

中外合作大学课程国际化的状况对于培养学生的国际素养具有重要影响。宁波诺丁汉大学的调查结果显示:在国际品性方面,其课程能够立足中国,培养学生对世界的开放性;在国际知识方面,其课程既能够与国际接轨又能够结合中国观点;在国际能力方面,其课程对国际沟通和问题解决能力的培养还有待加强。因此,要进一步促进课程国际化,还需要增加中国文化类课程的广度和深度,加强国际性通识性课程的建设,增进国内外师生的课堂内外交流。     

工商管理专业本科生应用能力培养探析

应用能力是影响工商管理专业本科毕业生就业的关键因素,如何培养学生的应用能力,已经成为工商管理专业本科教学改革的重点。从培养目标、实践教学、课程体系、师资队伍等四个方面探讨当前高校工商管理专业本科教学在学生应用能力培养方面存在的不足,并据此提出科学定位培养目标、强化实践教学在学生应用能力培养中的作用、以应用能力培养为导向设置课程体系、打造理论知识渊博与应用能力强的师资队伍等四个方面的改进建议。     

Implementing interactive courseware into EFL business writing: computational assessment and learning satisfaction

The implementation of interactive courseware within a task-based learning (TBL) approach was conducted for English Writing for Business to Chinese students in an applied foreign languages department housed in a university of technology. The development of the interactive courseware is based on Mayer’s multimedia learning theory, which allows learners to construct verbal and visual cognitive representations and integrate them; its language learning focus is keyed to Chapelle’s suggested criteria for development of multimedia CALL (computer assisted language learning). According to the curriculum, students had to accomplish three tasks rooted in the real world workplace: inquiry, negotiation, and complaint. Evaluation of the interactive ESP courseware into TBL instruction was based upon data from students’ pre- and post-writing performance measured by three different types of online computational assessments. In addition, a questionnaire survey about learning satisfaction was administered. The results indicate that students had significantly better post-writing performance and showed greater satisfaction after self-studying with the courseware-implemented instruction, which effectively integrated content knowledge, integrative English skills and writing practices embedded in the courseware. This instruction could be a potentially useful for teaching business writing by providing both content knowledge and its related integrative language practice.     

‘I have no English friends’: some observations on the practice of action learning with international business students

This account reports on some experiences of facilitating action learning with international business students. Interest in international student learning and the international student experience is significant and increasing with a considerable range of literature on the subject. Some of this literature is concerned with the perceived ‘problems’ or ‘deficits’ which international learners are said to bring to the UK university experience. Elsewhere the benefits which international students bring to the learning process are more positively highlighted. This paper describes some of the experiences derived from implementing action learning with a number of sets of international postgraduate business and management students in an HE business school setting. Specifically, it considers how educational, learning and cultural differences, expectations and assumptions influence the student experience, and how collaborative learning can be developed.     

高职国际技术贸易课程教学存在的问题与对策

国际技术贸易课程在高职国际经济与贸易专业的相关课程中具有特殊性,在教学实践中面临着学生的学习积极性不高,教师知识结构不合理,缺乏优秀的教材,教学方法传统守旧等问题。为此提出了要提高学生学习积极性,加强师资培训,编写出优秀的教材,改进教学方法和教学手段等措施。