From Lloyd Armstrong's weblog "Changing Higher Education," his post "Modularity in university higher education: Education:'
....For all of these students, learning about the effects of globalization,
and how to benefit from them, must become a core part of the
curriculum. The age-old semester or year abroad may well become a
standard, especially for traditional students. That time abroad can
increasingly be outsourced to a foreign educational partner so that the
traveling student truly can be immersed directly in the culture and
education of the receiving country.With increasing use of English as the language of instruction in
universities around the world, students can be placed in regular
classes of the foreign partner. However, David Gradoll, in a report for the British Council,
points out that with the increasing necessity for proficiency in
English worldwide, graduates that stand out will be those who are
fluent in English - plus other languages. Thus the time abroad also
will be invaluable for educating our students in another language.
Such partnerships may lead to the disappearance of foreign
study-abroad outposts maintained by individual American universities or
American consortia.....
And from his post "What has offshoring got to do with research universities?:
.... the country or region that is the motor of the global economy will set many of the
rules- just as the US has done in the past decades. For example, the
NIC suggests that intellectual property rules in the future likely will be set
by China and India,
not the US (Mapping the Global Future, p.35). Thus,
expertise for many of the things we now teach (in e.g. business, law, policy,
economics) will be shifting to another
part of the world. Again, does it make
sense to obtain some of that expertise through partnerships with institutions
(universities, corporations, governments) in Asia that
may well be directly involved in the evolution of the ground rules?....
And from his post "Offshoring Executives, not executive jobs:"
Anna Lee Saxon, dean of the School of Information at UC Berkeley is
quoted as saying,” People are finally realizing that the only way to
create cultural capabilities, linguistic skills and personal social
relationships is to move executives abroad.” We in universities should
know (but often seem not to) that an extended stay abroad is the only
way to accomplish the same goals with students. Education in this age
of globalization will certainly call for greatly increased emphasis on
a period spent in another culture - at least if we want to turn out the
kinds of graduates that Cisco and IBM are looking for.