The University of Nottingham is one of the UK’s most internationally active universities, enrolling around 9,000 international students in the UK and 9,000 students offshore. We caught up with its pro-vice-chancellor for internationalisation, Christine Ennew.
The PIE: What is the scope of Nottingham’s international activities?
CE: Although people tend to associate the University of Nottingham with our international campuses in Malaysia and China, I think that obscures the fact that we have a very broad-based internationalisation strategy. If you start off at the UK campus, then we’ve got a lot of work going on around the internationalisation of the curriculum, around content and skills.
“Our international campuses obscure the fact that we have a very broad-based internationalisation strategy”
We have a lot of activity in student integration, trying to get more involvement between the international and UK students to facilitate some of the learning that leads from that. And we have some interesting programmes which involve substantial periods of study outside of the UK.
Then [we have] conventional mobility and recruitment related activity; partnerships for business engagement and for research; then through to the campuses and the work we do with alumni groups. So it is very, very broad. What I would say is that we take the view that we can’t do everything everywhere, so we try to identify by region what we want to do and in which location.
The PIE: Do you run any twinning programmes?
CE: We do run twinning programmes, for example in Thailand and Indonesia, but we don’t really get involved in franchising or validation. We do find teaching partnerships to be beneficial and we’ve started to do a lot of joint and dual master’s programmes with the course split over two locations.
We’re also looking to do some cohort-based programmes, where we bring together students from Nottingham and another institution and they study initially at Nottingham, then they move to the other institution.
The PIE: You prefer to call to your campuses in Malaysia and China “international” rather than “branch” campuses? Why?
CE: Being a little pedantic, I try not to call them branch campuses because it always implies something a little bit partial – not quite the real thing. One of the things we have really tried to do, and I think we’ve succeeded to a degree, is to make sure those campuses have a similar set of activities as you would get in the UK. So they are research active, they are bringing in grants and they are working in partnership with other universities and business.
I try not to call them branch campuses because it always implies something a little bit partial – not quite the real thing
The PIE: What are the challenges of working transnationally?
CE: Ensuring the University of Nottingham brand and its standards are upheld across our operations is the main challenge. With the campus model we have direct input. It becomes more challenging in our partnership models, because there you don’t have the same set of controls and involvement.
Partnerships have always been about building close relationships, building trust, taking the long-term view, and being able to demonstrate to our partners that it is in both of our interests to focus on quality. I think we have had some success in doing that, but it is something that needs to be completely monitored and it does rely on good relationships and mutual trust.
The PIE: How have the UK’s student visa curbs hit Nottingham’s internationalisation activities? [more>>]
CE: As yet they haven’t had a huge impact on us. I think there’s a number of factors behind that. One is that we’ve worked quite hard in terms of conversion and in terms of supporting students, putting much more resource into helping them with visa issues. Clearly in the longer term [the policies] will put off students who can’t get visas, particularly as the increased living allowance requirement comes into force. But also it’ll do a lot of damage to our reputation.
I was taking to students yesterday, and they all asked about the visas and why we didn’t want them to come and study in the UK. You can correct that but it’s still a very negative perception. We feel that having the two international campuses is a great help to us because it allows us to offer an alternative. But I do worry about the longer-term consequences.
The PIE: Do you think transnational education will become an increasingly attractive option for UK universities as a result?
CE: I think there’s no doubt that more universities are starting to look carefully at offshore provision. It does offer a route to access international markets without falling foul of the visa regime. I think there’s a danger though that we all start to say transnational education (TNE) is the answer, and suddenly focus all our efforts in that direction.
To do TNE well requires serious long-term investment and just trying to do it quickly as a short-term fix for visa problems, I don’t think will be a sensible course of action. I think we’ve got to approach it from a long-term perspective and from a genuine partnership perspective.
The PIE: What do you think of HE Global (the new UK government initiative supporting universities looking to set up abroad)?
CE: I think it is a very interesting initiative that will be welcome across the sector. It’s early days yet to see quite how it works, but I do think it’s a good move. It’s about giving out information and trying to ensure that when the sector does engage with TNE we do so in an informed and long-term, quality-focused way.
“It’s early days yet to see quite how HE Global works, but I do think it’s a good move”
The PIE: What is Nottingham up to in 2012/13?
CE: We’ve still got discussions going on around our Shanghai initiative and we hope to be able to announce some activity towards the end of this [academic] year, with perhaps our first students getting involved in September 2012. It’s essentially a university based in Shanghai to complement the Nottingham campus in Ningbo.
The other [area] is the work we have been focussing on in new markets. We’re opening an office in Ghana and in India. In Ghana we’ll have quite a lot of focus on quite traditional student recruitment work and partnership development. In India the office will be focused much more based around partnerships, business engagement and alumni relations. We’re also working in Indonesia, Bangladesh, and have some significant activity in Ethiopia. I think that might keep us reasonably well occupied!
