NVAO launches platform for good practices in internationalisation
In Australia good practices in Quality Assurance have been made public through a digital archive for many years now. Personally I find this a very good source of information. So why not launch one in the Netherlands as well? That is exactly what NVAO, the Dutch Flemish Accreditation Organisation, did earlier this month.
Introducing a new platform
The platform was officially presented at a very interesting one-day seminar on internationalisation and quality assurance in The Hague. Like every year, the seminar was fully booked, but that was not its main success. The content of the programme included five good examples of quality of internationalisation, from which the audience was asked to select the Best practice.
It was hard to really compare the five practices on an equal basis as they included a variety of ingredients and a number of individual settings. However, the audience showed a clear preference for the two examples that included a large focus on learning outcomes for both staff and students.
Focus on learning outcomes
One of the examples by the Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) showed how you can investigate if your programme pays enough attention to the international learning outcomes it defined. RSM developed and used a programme courses matrix in which it matches the courses of a programme with the international (content) and intercultural (process) learning outcomes they defined.
Intercultural competence
The other example that caught my eye was the one that was sent in by the Hanze Hogeschool in Groningen. They set up an Intercultural Competence Learning Lab that offers teaching staff a safe environment for sharing intercultural experiences or incidents. But it doesn’t stop here: the lab also offers room for critical reflection on experiences and current intercultural competence (IC) models, and for discussing IC-related self-development issues.
Submit your own good practice
These and other good practices will thus be published on the Good Practices in Internationalisation Platform (GPIP) which is freely available to anyone interested. Dutch and Flemish institutions interested in showcasing their practices can send in their proposals. Examples should always be at the programme level and focus on at least one of the five standards of the Distinctive (Quality) Feature Internationalisation which are:
- vision
- learning outcomes
- teaching & learning
- staff
- students
The main 
criteria used to select a good practice is: A good practice has a positive and demonstrable effect on the quality of education. Demonstrable means you have to be able to deliver proof and data should be verifiable. Additionally, the good practice needs to be coherent in its description and, if I may add my personal opinion to that, with the institutional strategy and policy.
Benefits
According to NVAO sending in good practices is of great value for a programme or institution because it will help the institution to reflect on its own policy and implementation, focussing on the actual results.
Practices are judged by independent experts from the Netherlands and Flanders (I am one of them) which could provide you with valuable feedback. If your practice is accepted then you are in fact bi-nationally recognised and you will get international publicity through the platform. Finally, you contribute to the discourse on internationalisation by sharing your experiences with those of your colleagues in the field.
Sharing is gaining
And we all know that when sharing most things we end up with less, but when sharing knowledge we are bound to end up with more!