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Patti McGill Peterson, American Council on Education

PMP: But they’re running around among many flowers. Once the president articulates the vision, who will implement it and what will they have the power to do? It’s so easy when you’ve been fortunate in terms of the development of your higher education system to say we’re where we need to be. The fact is you’re never where you need to be especially in higher education. If US higher education is going to be useful and effective with its students, it must be connected in all of those facets, globally. That could be developing research networks with other institutions around the world or connecting classrooms.

"Even though ACE is called the American Council on Education we very much realise that that means being committed to higher education in the rest of the world"

And it’s not just Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford. 47% of our students are studying in community college so the question is how do they become globally attuned. That’s a huge challenge because those intuitions have not traditionally had a lot of study abroad going on because of the nature of the student body. Many of those students are working, they have families, social-economically it’s very difficult for them to think about a traditional study abroad programme. We’re working on how to bring the global to those classrooms.

The PIE: What are you doing to get the word out?

“And it’s not just Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford. 47% of our students are studying in community college”

PMP: We’re trying to disseminate the Mapping Report. That data shows where institutions are doing well over the sector of type of institution and where there’s room for improvement. We’re also revving up and building capacity in a number of our programmes. One is the Internationalisation Lab where we offer the opportunity for an institution to go into a year long process in which they audit themselves in terms of where they are in a number of dimensions of internationalisation.

They then assess those and build a strategy around that to improve and build direction for their internationalisation efforts. We also have a new section called “Internationalisation in Action” where we try to be helpful in very specific ways to internationalisation efforts on campuses and offer things that need to be done and how other institutions have done it.

The PIE: Where do you think MOOCs will fit in to internationalisation?

PMP: I would put this in the framework of the delivery of higher education. How can we cost effectively, with quality, deliver higher education across the world. There are many countries where the cost has gone very high, the US for example, and there are others who are just beginning to develop their higher education systems. The demand for higher education is growing exponentially and the question is how to meet it.

“My sense is we’re going to see more and more discussion about MOOCs and the blended use of them”

My sense is we’re going to see more and more discussion about MOOCs and the blended use of them. There’s a high degree of scepticism in the US about whether or not this is going to be an effective way to educate students and in other parts of the world there is concern about the knowledge and professors that are being shared through the MOOCS being very much based in the West and North of the globe.

I don’t think they’ll go away. Will they change, will they morph with they be carefully considered in other countries in terms of how they might be used? Yes. I think this is one of those stay tuned topics.

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