Early in my career, I worked on the sending side of international education. My institution had sponsored a group of teachers to study abroad, and when they returned, I found myself struggling to point to concrete changes in their practice. The experience had met its formal requirements. The hours were completed, the certificates issued. But the honest answer to “what changed?” was harder to give than it should have been.
That question has stayed with me.
It points to something the international education sector has been slow to confront: there is a growing gap between what sending organisations need and what most programs are actually designed to deliver. As long as we keep offering standardised solutions to context-specific problems, that gap will widen.
The global demand for workforce-aligned international education has shifted dramatically. Governments, corporations, hospitals, universities – organisations of every kind – are increasingly looking to international study experiences not as cultural add-ons, but as genuine tools for institutional development.
They want their teams to return with more than improved language skills. They want changed thinking, stronger professional networks, applicable competencies, and the kind of confidence that only comes from real immersion.
Highly specific institutional needs rarely fit neatly into general curricula. These are built to cater for a wide range of learners, broader contexts, the typical outcome.
And yet, when approached by clients with special requests, too often the default response from providers is to present existing catalogues and invite partners to adjust their expectations accordingly – to make their needs fit the product, rather than the other way around. However, the closer a program can get to their specificity, the more transformative the result tends to be.
Co-created programs start from a different question. Not “which of our existing offerings fits this group best?” but “what does this specific cohort actually need to be able to do, and how do we build learning experiences that get them there?”
The distinction sounds simple. In practice, it requires genuine collaboration — between sending organisations and receiving institutions, between curriculum designers and industry practitioners, between language specialists and subject matter experts.
Consider what this looks like concretely: a Brazilian education office partnering to design a customized, immersive teacher development program in Canada; a Japanese university building a credit-bearing language program that genuinely transitions their students into North American academic life; a Mexican network of high schools co-developing a course focused on future-ready skills rather than language-focused modules. These are not variations on a standard offer. They are purpose-built experiences, shaped by real institutional contexts and specific learning goals.
Participants are immersed in an environment where language, knowledge, identity, and network expand together, and they feel their goals are genuinely being catered to
When a program is built this way, learning stops being compartmentalised. Whether the goal is language proficiency, vocational certification, leadership development, or all three at once, the experience is designed so each dimension feeds the others rather than competing for space on a timetable.
Participants are immersed in an environment where language, knowledge, identity, and network expand together, and they feel their goals are genuinely being catered to. The connections built along the way — with peers, with local industry, with the city itself — are part of the curriculum, even when they don’t appear on the syllabus.
The international education sector has a genuine opportunity to move from commodity to catalyst. But that requires institutions willing to listen before they design, to build rather than simply rebrand existing content, and to measure success not by completion rates but by what actually changes after participants return home.
The question I couldn’t answer confidently early in my career is one every sending organisation deserves a better answer to. Co-creation is how we get there.
About the author: Vinicius (Vinnie) Nobre is vice-president of operations at ILSC Education Group in Canada, part of the global ILSC Education Group, which includes ILSC Language Schools, ELS Language Centers, Greystone College, and Greystone Institute. He is an author, MA tutor, and former president of BRAZ-TESOL.
