The Eastern European University Association held its first International Universities Networking Conference in Washington, DC in February: the first in a global rollout of its conference-workshop model, focused on building relationships between higher education institutions around the world.
Combining a series of morning seminars with one-on-one, pre-scheduled workshop-style meetings between higher education representatives from around the world, this is the first conference the association has held outside Russia, following four years of its IUNC Eurasia conference in Moscow.
IUNC North America took place on a much lower scale than IUNC Eurasia, attracting 30 participants
EEUA, which represents 57 member universities, is seeing an increasing trend among its members towards small-scale collaboration in higher education as a way to open up international partnerships, Bogdan Voronovskiy, executive director of EEUA, told The PIE News.
“For countries that are not very popular, still they try to [facilitate study abroad] through proposing students to go for summer first or short-term courses like one or two weeks so they can explore the country,” he explained.
“Many participants in our conference have agreed that previously [their internationalisation] policy was mostly that they wanted to prepare students for long term programmes, but when they see that because of different conditions it takes a lot of time and not many students go abroad, now they say it’s better to send them for one day than not to send them anywhere,” he added.
It is Voronovskiy’s hope that through IUNC, higher education institutions will form partnerships that will enable them to foster greater collaboration in the future.
Enabling universities from traditionally less popular study destinations in Eastern Europe to explore new partnership models with institutions in other parts of the world is of the event’s aims so EEUA will this year roll out its conference model to Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.
Attracting around 30 participants, the IUNC North America event took place on a much lower scale than IUNC Eurasia, which last year brought in some 300 attendees from across East Asia and around the world, but Voronovskiy is confident participation will grow.
“This format is very good for our participants in Eurasia but we understand that they are interested not only in Europe and Asia,” he said. “That is why we decided to make this conference in all regions.”
