Meeting the challenges of International University: IntUni

Abstract

The rapidly growing momentum of the internationalisation of Higher Education raises new acute questions and sets new goals for universities to find the best solutions in addressing the challenges of the increasingly global and competitive labour market. Striving to successfully strengthen its positions as an attractive education provider and a reliable international partner, VMU, one of the most liberal and modern academic institutions in Lithuania, for the first time included in the QS World University rankings in 2012/2013 and ranked from 601 onwards, nurturing the idea of artes liberales, places every effort to advance internationalisation as a response to the challenges of global world. Growing numbers of incoming and outgoing students, joint programme initiatives, online courses, blended learning, use of English as a language of instruction, linguistically and culturally heterogeneous classrooms and other responses to these challenges lead to the search for new teaching and learning methods and approaches, new ways of interaction and forms of communication. Under these circumstances, the initiatives proposed by the IntUni Erasmus Academic Network project (http://intluni.eu) help tertiary education institutions to find the best solutions for efficient work within the Multilingual and Multicultural Learning Space. The present study aims, first of all, at delivering an overview of the main goals, objectives and the project outcomes achieved so far of the IntUni Erasmus Academic Network project. Using the IntUni project guidelines as the basis, the study examines the tendencies of internal and external internationalisation of VMU including the outline of the latest trends in international mobility and the analysis of the specificity of multilingual classes in terms of culture, language and ethnicity related issues. [...]