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Surveying Internationalization: The Canadian university experience

Internationalization encompasses all of a university’s international activities including student mobility, international research collaboration, institutional partnerships and transnational education activities. Reliable aggregate data on these activities enables institutions to benchmark their activities, strategically shape their programs and policies, and advocate externally for policy priorities.

The first part of this session will focus on an analysis of data from the recent AUCC Internationalization Survey of Canada’s universities, the results of which were released in December 2014. This survey, the first of its kind since AUCC’s last such survey in 2006, presents an authoritative picture of internationalization activities across Canadian universities. It presents key findings of how internationalization activities are prioritized and carried out in university administration, strategic partnerships, research, student mobility, and teaching and learning.

FAUBAI conference organizers are invited to view the report of the AUCC survey results – Canada’s Universities in the World – available on the AUCC website at: http://www.aucc.ca/media-room/publications/canadas-universities-world-aucc-internationalization-survey/.

The AUCC survey results are also informative in identifying areas where there are still information gaps, and where further, more in-depth research would be beneficial. For example, the survey captures institutional perspectives on Canadian student preferences for overseas study destinations; a more in-depth survey of students themselves would be very useful to elaborate on these findings.

The second part of this session will explore the value of such surveys for informing and influencing public discourse and policies on international education. As national and regional governments increasingly look to university internationalization as a means of recruiting international students and boosting national innovation agendas, universities must be able to communicate facts about their internationalization efforts in order to inform sound public policy-making. The AUCC presenter will share information on how the results of this survey have been communicated within Canada and abroad, and to what effect. This may provide some useful food-for-thought for FAUBAI vis-à-vis its own capacity to influence public discourse and policy development on the internationalization of Brazilian higher education.

Author(s):

Rachel Lindsey    
Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada
Canada