Rethinking the internationalization of higher education

Sound clip: You’re listening to a Times Higher Education podcast.

Sara Custer: Hello and welcome to the Times Higher Education podcast. I’m Sara Custer, the associate editor for curation here at THE. The pandemic has forced a major rethink of international higher education. Travel restrictions over the past year have put a huge dent in international student enrollments for key destination countries like the UK and the US. And after a year of doing everything remotely, the thought of jumping on a plane every month to go to student recruitment fairs or international academic conferences seems both unnecessary and irresponsible from a carbon zero perspective. So what’s next for the internationalization of higher education, international student mobility and English as a mode of instruction? We’re bringing you two perspectives on these questions today. One from a former international student turned researcher from Nigeria, now working in the UK, and an academic administrator with 28 years of experience in all sectors of postsecondary education in Hong Kong. And joining me today, as always, is Miranda Prynne, the content curator at THE Campus. Hi, Miranda.

Miranda Prynne: Hello.

Sara Custer: Tell us about who you spoke to for today’s show.

Miranda Prynne: I spoke to Omolabake Fakunle, who is Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Moray House School of Education and Sport and Institute for Education, Community and Society. As you’ll hear, Omolabake can speak from a very personal perspective about the challenges and benefits of studying overseas, as well as drawing on her extensive research in this area. But one thing that she was particularly focused upon is exactly how we define internationalisation and what we want from it.

Miranda Prynne: Hi there, today I’m talking with Omolabake Fakunle, who came to study in the UK 10 years ago from Nigeria, first at the University of Central Lancashire, then at the University of Edinburgh, where she completed her PhD in 2019. Hi there, good to have you on the podcast.

Omolabake Fakunle: Thank you very much, Miranda. Lovely to be here.

Miranda Prynne: Oh, it’s great to have you. Now, your research I know focuses on the intersection of internationalisation, inclusivity, employability and education policy. So it would be hard to find someone better placed to discuss today’s topic, which is the internationalisation of higher education, how it’s changing, and what the future could or perhaps should hold. So, to start us off, I’m just interested to hear from you how you think the internationalisation of HE has been affected by the pandemic and what you think the longer-term effects may be?

Omolabake Fakunle: Oh, yeah, thank you very much for that question. And it’s certainly very timely and well-timed as well. Because the very obvious thing we’ll talk about is our mobility has been constrained due to the pandemic. And that has, of course, led to emergent and fluid strategy development, you know, by universities, by countries, in order to grapple with what we can easily agree, I believe, was a very unexpected event in higher education. This then means that institutions are re-evaluating their strategic approach, but how and what the re-evaluation would turn out to be remains to be seen. I still think we are still working through that process, but then that means we have a great opportunity for researchers in the field to work with policymakers and educators to reframe the current dominant conceptualization of internationalization, which is very well written about being economic-oriented, being driven mostly as a process, you know, system organizational approach, and then move towards a more holistic approach, which, of course, is something I write about and something I’m very, very interested in researching as well.

Miranda Prynne: Yeah, so I mean, on that point of, I suppose, the potential that you talk about, the opportunity to sort of reframe international education, do you think, you know, online, the kind of increase of online and rise of digital education will be a kind of help or hindrance in this instance?

Omolabake Fakunle: I think online and digital education has great potential to enhance internationalization. But as with any tool, what matters is how technology is deployed to support internationalization. I mean, in one of my recent papers co-authored with colleagues in Australia and Canada, we explored the lack of integration of online learning in internationalization discourses in three institutional and national contexts. And what we need to do is actually re-evaluate what exactly is conceptually, how do we conceptualize online and digital education and integrate it into the ideals of internationalization? That’s still an area where there is potential for us to research and to explore. But that it would be a benefit. I have no doubt in my mind that it could enhance it. But are we there yet? I think we’re still on that journey.

Miranda Prynne: Yeah, can you expand on that at all when you talk about sort of integrating it with the ideals? Like what would that entail? Can you kind of drill into the detail at all of what you sort of mean by that?

Omolabake Fakunle: Okay, on the very fundamental or should we say conceptual level, internationalization is poorly conceptualized still because it’s still seen more like an organizational process, you know, top-bottom with leading strategies and it mostly encompasses mobility in terms of student numbers, staff numbers as well, and counting, you know, like the number of, it’s really, really internationalization by numbers. But what we need to do is to integrate the human dimension of internationalization. And that’s what my research focuses on. How can we integrate the humanity really into internationalization discourses? So if we move to that point, which we’re not yet there, because you would find a lot of strategies and it’s still very instrumental in its conceptualization. So if we then move there, we can now consider who are the people that we are working with when we say online and digital education. Who do we want to reach? Is it still perpetuating more of the same in terms of these tools that universities have got to reach a wider group of people? Or are we really, really looking at international education to make a change?

Miranda Prynne: Yeah, yeah. So I suppose what you’re saying is it’s sort of quality over quantity in a way, sort of get away from the numbers and look at the kind of impact in a more societal, cultural, kind of, you know, the complexities of it.

Omolabake Fakunle: Yeah, exactly. And I think what that then means is what really is the purpose of internationalization? And I think, you know, I was really grateful you, I had some time to think about all of this before this meeting. And one thing I can say is we still have, you know, a question, which is an essential question for internationalization. Is education a public good or a private good? But the issue is the way we frame this question right now is largely driven from human capital development contextualized within a national frame of understanding and competitiveness. I think we need to move the conversation to consider the value we place on education as a global good. Now, that would be a starting point for a conversation that considers international education and collaboration as a learning process where all contributors are seen as equal partners. So when we’re talking about reaching out more, because that’s what technology would give us when we have this online digital education in place, and we have internationalization that is poorly defined in terms of addressing even that basic fundamental question of is it a public good or a private good? And we’ve not really, I don’t think we’ve really answered that question, you know, convincingly to inform policy direction. And that’s what we need to do as researchers.

Miranda Prynne: Yeah, which actually sort of I suppose naturally leads on to the next thing I really wanted to touch on, which is what you feel the kind of major barriers are to a more in inverted commas internationalized global higher education system. I mean, do you think that is a big part of the problem is simply a lack of sort of definition of really what internationalization is or should be?

Omolabake Fakunle: You see, well, definitions are very important because definition gives us a frame to actually see whether what we’re doing is what we say we want to do or we’re deviating from what we define a concept to be. In the case of internationalization, what we have found is because it’s the definition is so fuzzy and you know it means different things to different people, and some people may even think that they’re not seen in the definitions of internationalization, which is like this seen as an organizational process, then it brings a barrier. And that barrier, in my opinion, is that internationalized global education systems is still not quite integrated and inclusive in terms of taking into account different knowledges and cultures. So, what we have is the legacy of hegemonic knowledge production, even though a lot of researchers are involved in international collaborations, but still, which knowledge is valued? What do the different partners bring to the table? And how is that seen as knowledge production?

Miranda Prynne: Yeah, I mean, that’s an incredibly interesting point. And I suppose it sort of leads into the obvious question of, you know, there’s overlap with what you’ve just said, and this question of how can international education be extended really to more kind of diverse, nontraditional students. Because at the moment, one of the major criticisms leveled at it is that really it caters for a kind of very wealthy elite who can afford to study overseas rather than potentially extending this amazing educational offering to others who could really benefit. What do you think could be done or could be changed to address this, to bring in more diverse students?

Omolabake Fakunle: I would say even that point, you know, about internationalization or international education being an affordance for the wealthy elite is actually contested by some scholars because we don’t actually collect data on the economic status of those who participate in higher education. So if we do not have empirical evidence to support that, then what it tends to mean is that there is this, we perpetuate this myth, in my opinion, which has been written by people like, you know, Stan Ploner, that the international students are very wealthy, all of them. I’m not saying a lot of international students are not very wealthy, but let’s first of all just acknowledge that without scholarship, a lot of international students will not even be able to participate in education abroad. And I’ve seen that, you know, in other people’s research, in my own research as well. But we don’t talk a lot about this because what we talk about is the contribution, you know, of the international student as a whole, but we don’t probe into the source of the money, whether they are to sell their farm or their houses in order to participate in international education for access to progress their own career or employability. So that is actually contended in the literature. But now to move on to your question about how it can be extended to a more diverse, nontraditional students, at the very basic level, we would need to interrogate policy and change policy to make change happen. And we need a buy-in of leadership. Because scholars in the field, myself included, have written about the need to reframe internationalization, one, to be more inclusive. And also, two, I wrote a paper recently, last year, and I talked about the economic side of economic rationale for internationalization from the student point of view. And I divided it into two. One, of course, is that legitimate need for career advancement, which I just talked about. But the second bit is the lack of access due to a lack of funding. And the students that were involved in my own study for my PhD, majority of them would not have been able to even be called international students without the government funding they received or funding from friends and family, pulling all resources together just to be able to be in the UK to study. So there is a lot of work that needs to be done in that regard. I mean, one of the recommendations I give in my paper is: can institutions actually, you know, keep aside a percentage of these billions that international students bring from all these sources and put it into a fund for scholarship. I think it would be amazing if institutions can be can be, you know, metrics can be used to measure how inclusive institutions are if they can do this and put it in their international education strategy.

Miranda Prynne: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I suppose one of the major problems, you talk about the lack of empirical evidence, really, about sort of how international students are paying for these courses and what potential sacrifices many of them may be making, which of course is going to, you know, that’s going to be crucial to then facilitate a kind of overhaul of policy and funding and so on. So I can see there’s a kind of disconnect there that will need addressing, and I’m sure people like you with your research will help. In terms of sort of the beneficiaries, I suppose, of the international education system, I mean, do you think there is at the moment a legitimate concern over the fact that the sort of traditional, you know, well-known Western institutions mean that basically there’s a bit of a sort of influence and talent drain to the West, and actually that the countries that many international students may be coming from don’t benefit as much? Or do you think that it sort of filters back?

Omolabake Fakunle: That’s a great question. In the first instance, I think it’s quite obvious, you know, in terms of the draw from the global south to the global north in terms of mobility. But it’s not quite as simple as that. Trends in global mobility, at least from UNESCO data, shows us that there is an increase in regional mobility. For example, in Asia, where China is fast growing, you know, as a regional hub, as well as Africa, when you have top senders of international students to South Africa, they are from the African continent. So, the question is: how do we define an international student? Because this aspect of the discourses, even though it’s out there and it’s coming up, you know, talking about regional mobility, it’s not yet quite mainstream. What is in a lot of people’s mind when they talk about international education is this, you know, this outdated, in my opinion, push-pull model, which centers Western higher education. And I’ve written about this as well in a paper that I published last year on student rationales for studying abroad. It doesn’t take into account this regional mobility. It doesn’t take into account mobility that is from a Western country to another Western country. So, there are still fundamental issues in how we use the data to determine mobility. Inasmuch as I totally agree, the data is there, that in terms of absolute numbers, more students move from the global south to the global north. And the key point is that the funding available in the western countries will attract talent in a global world because the global world is still very much economically driven. But then we need to still go beyond that to the questions I to the comments I made earlier about whether education is seen as a public good or a private good. And you know, I actually came to realize this year, it was actually a moment of realization for me because this question you pose is something that’s been posed to me as well by people that when are you going back to your country? Now, I don’t want to talk about the ramifications of that in terms of, you know, whether it’s a racist comment or not, but even in terms of intellectualism and in terms of brain drain and talent drain, why am I here is a question I have asked myself. Why did I remain here after my PhD? But in class this year, I started a new course and the course, of course, which I spoke about, I wrote about in the Times Higher Education Campus piece. In this course, I realized that a lot of my students, the majority of my students, even did not know that Africa is not a country. So, and they are master students. So, when they use examples and they said, oh, you know, Africa, and then they said, and China, and I asked them which country in Africa, and we had to distill this. So, we were disconstructing the notion of Africa. In fact, it was interesting. Let’s just put it that way. It was interesting and it was eye-opening for me. And you know, one of the things that came out in my class, one of one, not one student actually would say then, you know, feeding also to the dominant narratives that you know nobody from Asia would go to Africa to study because it’s too risky and the education system is not developed. So, what I had to do for my students is we dedicated a whole lecture to interrogating the UNESCO data on mobility because you know it’s a very lovely graph. So, I asked them to pick countries and look at the mobility flows. Oh boy, you should see the surprise from a lot of students. They were shocked to know that UNESCO data did capture that the 10th, you know, largest sender of students to South Africa is United States. You should have seen the shocked looks I was getting. They were, and they said, Oh, I said, Well, it’s UNESCO data, I didn’t put it there, and it was a moment of realization for them. And you know, they also look at their own countries and they were looking at the flows, and they’re like, Wow, we thought everybody in China is studying in either the US or the UK. And for me, that was so important to be able to disconstruct and construct knowledge based on empirical data. But of course, you need more.

Miranda Prynne: And breaking down, as you say, just kind of assumed stereotypes, sort of you know, that people haven’t clearly questioned. Um, just a very quick point to end. I just wondered what if there was sort of one key thing you’d like to see change in higher education with regard to internationalization, whether through policy, access, finance, what would it be?

Omolabake Fakunle: I put in a set of recommendations in my papers drawing on findings from my PhD, and I proposed a framework of understanding international students’ rationales for study abroad beyond economic reasons. One of the suggestions is that universities, like I’ve already said, may want to consider investing funds from international students to widen access. I think it would be amazing if universities can enact policy to make this happen. And then this will go some way to show that internationalization is not just elitist, which is, by the way, of course, a normalizational discourse that is not backed by empirical evidence, as I’ve said. As not all international students are from wealthy families, there’s also a need to address the policy void in relating internationalization and employability. I just published a paper on this, and I’m pleased that these two papers have attracted interest and discussions from people from within the field and beyond. And I’m currently working on developing partnerships and research collaborations to further contribute to policy development in this space because I just think it’s so important. My own experience, you know, allowed me to really understand this process. And this is helping me to also, I mean, if I can quickly say, I faced a great odd to secure admission at a UK university, and I spent a year trying to get a place for my top-up degree. The saddest instance for me was a rejection from a university, and the agent blamed me for it, asking why I told the university country representative that I had a young child, because the rep did not think older females with children are serious international students. Well, look at me now. But I met another rep from another uni who gave me a chance and encouraged me to apply for a global scholarship, which I got. So, when we talk about all of this, there are hidden issues. You know, I didn’t think it was humane for the university to deny me a place because I have a child, but it happens.

Miranda Prynne: Yeah, and it comes back to that point about needing higher education, not just cross-border, but at every level to cater for a much more diverse and wider sort of pool. I think, you know, the research you’re doing and others in this space hopefully will have a big impact. Look, it’s been absolutely lovely talking to you, but I’m sure we’ll speak again at some point on THE Campus. And thanks so much for joining us today and sharing your thoughts. It’s been absolutely fascinating.

Omolabake Fakunle: Thank you very much, Miranda.

Miranda Prynne: So, while highlighting the more personal challenges for some international students through her own experience, the main conclusion from Omolabake really is that we need more research and more data around the challenges and impact of international study in order to reshape and enhance its benefits for the future.

Sara Custer: Yeah, and I really liked her question at the very beginning of that: asking about is internationalization a public good or is it a private good? And that’s the question that we need to answer to really inform public direction and public policy around internationalization.

Sara Custer: And that question about public policy and government policy around internationalization is something that I spoke to Benjamin Chan at the Open University of Hong Kong about. He wrote a piece for us recently talking about a mismatch between the ambitions of government initiatives to increase English taught classes in Asia, right across Asia, and the actual capacity of professors to deliver that promise and for students to really learn in that way. That’s the first thing we started talking about. Here now is my conversation with Benjamin Chan, the dean of the Li Ka Shing School of Professional and Continuing Education at the Open University of Hong Kong.

Sara Custer: Benjamin, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s nice to speak with you. Thank you for inviting me. You recently wrote a piece for THE that was talking about internationalization across Asia and how it’s been very successful over the past decade. But in that piece, you also expressed some doubt about the serious government initiatives to increase classes taught in English across the region. Tell us a bit more about the mismatch of ambition and reality on the ground and how you think that could impact the region’s internationalization efforts long term.

Benjamin Tak Yuen Chan: All right. Perhaps we can start talking about it from the point of policymaking from various governments. I think it’s quite understandable why East Asian governments would like to internationalize their universities. First of all, almost all the regions are experiencing a falling number of students in our education systems. Everybody’s vying for top talents. So being able to interface with the outside world, opening up a higher education system, is the right policy to do. So the first prerequisite to do it is to teach in English. So that’s the motivation. But then, as you said quite rightly, there is sort of a mismatch. The mismatch happens where. It’s actually, if you look at the bulk of students in these East Asian countries, like for example Japan, Taiwan, many students are not ready to receive instructions in English medium of instruction. And then you have influx of international students into the system, where expectation is for classes to be taught in English. And therefore, you are expecting the foreign students and the local students to be sitting in the same classroom and to be taught by teachers using English medium. So there are two issues. One is about teaching staff. Where do you find them? Do you have enough of them? And the other is about the receptivity of the local students to this kind of instruction. So let’s first talk about the teachers. If there is a government policy that this should happen, I think most universities would have to implement. They really have very little leeway to maneuver. So the easiest way to do it is to hire teachers who can teach in English. If not available in the system, they would have to find it from overseas. And then they will have to train up their teachers to teach in English. But then it doesn’t mean to say when you have teachers lecturing in English in the classroom, then everything goes on smoothly. You have to think about your local students. For example, systems like Taiwan, they may not have that many students in class, to be honest, that are ready to be taught in English. So the government embarked on something called the Bilingual Nation 2030 strategy, which is to say that by the year 2030, in a decade’s time, a large majority of secondary graduates in their country will be ready to be taught using English medium when they go into college. So, that by itself is a very big challenge. The challenge falls on secondary school and primary school, of course, because the Taiwanese policy is to start from primary school. So, you have multiple layers of issues starting from the school system having to respond to it. And then, the case with systems like Japan, they have so many universities. They have, I think, 700-something universities. So, a large number of universities that are having international students and internationalized programs for the entire universities, there may be just a few programs that are opening up to foreign students. So, what is effectively happening in the system is that the university hasn’t changed much. It has got some foreign students fitted into programs that are taught in English. And that may be called internationalization. So, that’s for Japan. And then, the case for Taiwan is, as I said, very, very ambitious. They are trying to overhaul the entire system. I’ve been thinking about the stress on the system. Because, as you know, I come from Hong Kong and I work in Hong Kong. I know our education system right from primary school, we always have subjects taught in English. The students come through primary, secondary, university. But then when they come into postsecondary, into higher education, we still got a lot of students who need extra help with their English language. So, in that way, you can see it’s not that straightforward. Yeah, so the students do need help. In places like Taiwan, I think, and in Japan, the policy objective of internationalizing universities does not apply to the entire higher education system because there is specific funding available. And this specific funding normally goes to the top-ranked universities. So, if this policy is pursued, in the long run, I’m sure there will be successful universities, more internationalized, accepting a lot of foreign students, but then there will be an equity issue as a result. So, one of the major impacts. And then, if you look at the stress placed on the entire school system, because the school system also has to comply and change. So, for example, in Taiwan, they have a language policy. Of course, most of the classes are taught in the national language Mandarin, but they’re also allowing the two other recognized languages to be taught in school. And then they also have minority languages also introduced into primary and secondary. It’s already a very crowded language terrain in school. And then how are you going to insert this new demand into the school system? And by so doing, you exert so much pressure into the school system. Are you going to churn out the expected results? So this is an unknown. It will come out within 10 years’ time. We’ll know about the results. But I’m just thinking about the stress placed on those systems. So to me, I think it is definitely a good thing for universities in East Asia to internationalize, to accept foreign students, to use the English medium. But there are certain impacts, and these impacts are not small impacts. So there will be some cost to bear in the long run.

Sara Custer: So it sounds like what you’re saying is there’s a bit of window dressing going on right now, perhaps on the part of these government initiatives saying we’re offering classes in English when in reality the people who end up losing out on those are potentially local students because their level of English isn’t high enough to really benefit from those classes even if they are taking it and potentially international students who go there expecting an immersive experience when they’re perhaps siloed off in the international English-speaking bit of a university, while the main activity of the university is still very much in the local language.

Benjamin Tak Yuen Chan: Yes, yes, that’s quite right. Because whenever there is a government policy, universities have to comply, they have to do their best to implement. And because it comes in quite a short span of time, and the universities are expected to deliver. So, as I said, they will be focusing on immediate actions that they can take. And that would be lectures in English and hire teachers who can deliver in English. So, there are issues related to classroom instruction, which I think is a much bigger issue rather than simply saying about English MOI.

Sara Custer: Let’s move on to that because that is a point that you also mentioned in the piece that you wrote for us that said that internationalization has exposed Asian universities to new types of teaching models. And it sounds like, in your opinion, that is a good thing. So, tell us a bit more about that and how faculty have responded to this change in teaching model.

Benjamin Tak Yuen Chan: Well, actually, it was something that I picked up during an academic forum that my school hosted quite recently. We had invited a professor from Japan, and he’s from one of the more internationalized universities there. He said that in his university, apart from teaching in English, they spend a lot of effort training their staff not just to deliver lessons in English, but to be at the forefront of using the latest teaching and learning techniques. So they have partnership with American universities and universities in other English-speaking countries to immerse their staff in the latest developments in teaching and learning. I think that is something that should be done in parallel to promoting English MOI. Because when we talk about universities trying to internationalize, I think it’s not a shortcut. I mean, there are so many universities in the world, even in the Asian region, in Southeast Asia and in other parts of Asia, that are teaching in English. So if you say your university is teaching in English, it doesn’t outrightly make you internationalize. You’ve got to be at the forefront of delivering a superb educational experience for students. So to me, I think a university that teaches in English plus delivers top-level learning experiences for students would be a very attractive option for internationally mobile students. And how would this be received by staff? I think in the old days, I’ll be looking at the way we teach English, even for a system that is so used to English MOI like Hong Kong. A lot of our students, when coming to college, coming to university, they still go through the standard college English, or you may call it English for academic purposes, which is, I think, quite old school, to be honest, because you’ll be focusing on grammatical teaching, vocabulary building, and then stressing on the four skills, the reading, the listening, the speaking and the writing. It’s so established. It has been like that from school to university. But is it fit for purpose? Now, if this is fit for purpose, then we would not be having difficulty with some of our students who need extra help with the other subjects that are in English. So that’s why in more recent days, a lot of the university teachers, not just in language, but also in subject disciplines, are talking about something called content language integrated learning, CLIL. This is an approach wherein they combine language teaching with the subject discipline. So effectively, you are learning the language at the same time as you learn what is there in the discipline. I mean, this is promoted in some areas like tourism and hospitality subject discipline. So it’s quite common in that area. I think it’s very useful. I mean the the original conception is not from this region. It’s actually from your region, actually from Europe. The European region has been coming together since the 1990s and then the birth of the European Union to become a multilingual Europe. So apart from the national language, English is also the lingua franca. So a lot of European universities are able to teach in English and they’ve been quite successful. I think Asia has been drawing lessons from that kind of experience. And it’s coming over to our place. I’ve seen pockets of teachers in Japan, in Taiwan, in Hong Kong researching and using this approach. So I think it’s something useful. The other thing which is quite useful is not new. It’s flipped classroom. This is used quite often now because of the pandemic. Teachers make recordings of their lectures. The students would digest it, read it beforehand, and then they could and they could come to class not spending time listening to the teachers delivering the lecture, but rather using it for classroom discussion. So, in a context where in students’ English language ability is not that strong, I think flipped classroom is appropriate because when the teacher does the recording and sends it beforehand, the students who have weaker levels of English can digest the materials, check the vocabulary, check for understanding, talk in the background with other students, and then when he or she comes to class, I think he or she will be more prepared to join the discussion. Otherwise, it will be a catastrophe wherein the students who are very lesser ability in English will be struggling to listen to the lesson and at the same time struggling to respond to the teacher. So I think small steps, the use of CLIL, the use of flipped classroom, can actually help. So you can see that these new teaching approaches are coming over. So when you ask what is the faculty’s response, I think all faculties naturally want their students to learn. And I think it’s a good thing. So I would say that more and more faculties in our region are taking up these approaches to help their students learn in English.

Sara Custer: Yeah. Yeah. And I’m sure the pandemic has also an element to speak about here if we’re speaking about new teaching models and innovation in teaching. And I’m curious to know about your own institution, the Open University of Hong Kong, which actually does a lot of face-to-face classes. Tell us a little bit about your own journey in this pandemic. The legacy of your university as a distance education provider, did that make you feel better prepared in the shift to online classes the past year? And how do you think that internationalization at your institution has been affected by the pandemic?

Benjamin Tak Yuen Chan: Thank you very much for raising this and thank you very much for allowing me to say something about our university. The Open University of Hong Kong is roughly 32 years old. It was actually founded in 1989. It has a lot of image of the Open University UK when it was founded. This summer, the university will be retitled. We’re going to have a new name. It’s going to be called the Hong Kong Metropolitan University. The reason for that is because over the years it has evolved and currently we mainly serve full-time students. We have a lot of undergraduate students. We have roughly 10,000 of them studying full-time. And then on top of that, we have sub-degree students doing associate degree higher diploma. We also have students doing master’s program. And then we have the research degrees, the MPhil and PhD. So if you compare the scale of our operation with the other universities in Hong Kong, we roughly are placed about number six in the lineup. So we had a tradition. We we were initially conceived as a distance learning education institution serving mainly adult students. We have transitioned our mission. But then we still have the distance learning part. And as a result, we have an educational technology development unit. It is very well resourced, very experienced and very well staffed. No other universities in Hong Kong have such a unit, although all universities have a teaching and learning unit. So that’s the difference of our university to the other universities in Hong Kong. And because of the existence of this unit, the ETDU for short, it has been helping the staff transition quickly during the coronavirus pandemic. And you may remember that because of Hong Kong’s proximity to China, we were roughly one month ahead of other universities in having to deal with this online transition. So ours was a smoother one, I would say. It was a much smoother transition because of this tradition. Technologically, we had the very good advice and support of the ETDU. So if you look at my school, for example, we had transitioned out quite a number of activities, extracurricular, cocurricular, online. The reasons for that is especially with the the group of students that came in as freshmen in September of 2002, our worry was that we didn’t see the students and the students didn’t see us. There was no chance for them to be in touch with us, honestly. So we had orientation online, we had everything online. So what kind of educational experience would you be providing? I mean, it’s some kind of extraordinary situation. But even if it’s extraordinary, you have to deliver a sort of equivalent to campus experience. So we did a lot of brainstorming among my staff. So we had a lot of activities transition, and we were very focused on providing one thing: social-emotional learning. We think that the social affective domain of the students’ learning needs to be taken care of. And we’re quite proud of that because we have a lot of activities going on. And then we made a check on the students’ reception towards this, about all these extra things that we’ve been providing. We had an online gathering to chat with them in early January. And their response was very positive. They even told us, I think we’ve got too much. But to me, I think as the dean of school, I think it’s better to have more than less. Because that means to say we are providing choices. And then after January, we were concerned about students’ exchange overseas because there’s no traveling allowed. So, this meaning to say these years students would have no overseas exchange. So, we then have virtual exchange. And one of the very interesting things because we have a lot of exchanges with Japan. So, what we did was we talked to the local consulate general. We had the support of the various Japanese prefectural governments. So, we were able to come up with a series called Virtual Japan Lecture and Travel Series, and it’s supported by many prefectures in Japan. So, every month we introduce one prefecture. So, it’s supported by the local prefecture. The local tour guide in that prefecture would bring us remotely to view the scenic places to tell us about the history, the local culture. And it’s very well subscribed. The students quite like it. So, it’s one way to provide an alternative learning experience, even though you cannot physically travel. I mean, we can’t say that we are doing it in an excellent way, but I think the students’ reception to it is very, very positive.

Sara Custer: That sounds like a really great initiative, and I’m sure it probably mirrors what quite a few universities have had to do in the past year as travel has been more restricted as a result of COVID-19. Before all of this started, though, there was a very healthy flow of international students, mostly coming from your part of the world over to my part of the world in Europe and also to the US. I’m wondering how you see international student mobility recovering from the pandemic, and also perhaps if there’s an opportunity here to maybe make some improvements on the system that was in place before all this happened.

Benjamin Tak Yuen Chan: Well, I think if you read articles written by academics and probably the international education specialists, there’s been a lot of speculation ranging from the early days of the pandemic, everybody was so scared, no more international students going to the West. And then more recently, people are more upbeat saying that recovery is on the horizon. I think recovery is going to happen very soon because it’s something very practical. Because if you compare vaccination rates, I think the level of vaccination rate is higher in most traditional Western countries receiving international students. In the East, in Hong Kong, in China, the vaccination level is still very low. And then there is a group of students who are, I think, determined to go overseas for international study. And their primary choice is to go to the West. That group will always exist. So to me, I think for those who would like to go to the West, they will still go there. So there’s no reason to think that the flow will stop. I don’t believe it will be changed. But something interesting is happening: if you look at the number of students going to countries in this region that are opening up and having more programs taught in English, China, Japan, Taiwan, their objective is to draw in students from within the region, from within the Asian region, because Asia is such a large continent with nearly 50 countries. So there’s abundant supply from Southeast Asia, there are 10 countries, there are five or six countries in South Asia, there’s even Central Asia, the Middle East. So plentiful supply within the region. So what we are seeing, I think, is intra-regional internationalization. So instead of them going to the West, some of them, because of generous scholarship, low tuition fee, and then economic development and job prospects are actually quite good if they stay on after graduation. I think they will be drawn to these destinations. And China, I think, currently is already number three in the list of recipient countries. I think it will continue. And then the plans of the Japanese government, the 300,000 foreign students, has actually been met in 2020. Now it’s Taiwan’s turn to be ambitious in receiving foreign students. For my own place, Hong Kong, we have always had a target of 20% of foreign students. Like if you admit 100, you can admit 20 more foreign students. But in the past, that level has rarely been exceeded. I think it’s just around 16%. So Hong Kong will not see much change. I think it will be quite constant at that level. But you do see intra-regional regionalization, which is quite interesting. I think it’s a phenomenon that should be observed in the long run.

Sara Custer: Excellent, Ben. Thank you so much for your time today. It was a really fascinating discussion and I think a perspective on internationalization from a part of the world that we don’t often hear from. So thank you very much for that.

Benjamin Tak Yuen Chan: Thank you so much, Sara.

Sara Custer: So Benjamin ends there talking about his expectations to see student mobility picking up quite soon after the pandemic and the flow of students from east to west will maintain. But he also expects to see more inter-regional internationalization within Asia, which goes back to a point that Omolabake was making about the mobility to China and how fast growing it is, which of course was a trend that we saw before the pandemic. But it’s interesting to hear both of their perspectives saying that they expect that to pick up quite soon.

Miranda Prynne: Yeah, and if you want to find out more of Omolabake or Ben’s thoughts on international education and indeed other aspects of teaching and learning, you will find resources from both of them on THE Campus. That’s timeshighereducation.com/campus. And we also have a spotlight collection of advice resources, all looking at the question of teaching across borders and how online tools can facilitate this.

Sara Custer: Yes, and we will, of course, leave links to all of those pieces from Omolabake, Ben and our spotlight collection on teaching across borders in the notes for this podcast. Miranda, thanks for joining me today.

Miranda Prynne: Thank you, and thank you to Omolabake for such a fascinating chat. And thanks to Ben for joining us today. We’ll see you next time. Bye.

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