Moscow hosted a two-day international conference “Internationalization imperatives” which was organized by the National Workforce Training Fund in cooperation with the Russian International Affairs Council and the New Eurasia Foundation with support from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation on May 24, 2012
Moscow hosted a two-day international conference “Internationalization imperatives” which was organized by the National Workforce Training Fund in cooperation with the Russian International Affairs Council and the New Eurasia Foundation with support from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation on May 24, 2012. The conference was attended by prominent specialists from Russia, USA, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Singapore and Kazakhstan: M. Miner, J. Sadlak, A. Dosmak, P. Rolfe, J. E. Lane, V. Martinov, B. Sumsky, V. Zabotkina, M. Larionova, S. Lunev, T. Huziyatov and others. The Russian International Affairs Council was represented by its Director General A. Kortunov and Program Director I. Timofeev. The speakers highlighted such issues as globalization of education, challenges and competitive advantages of exporters and importers of education, the representativeness ratings of universities, the interaction of science, universities, government and business, and internationalization of the educational process in Russia.
The conference was opened by Igor Protsenko, Director of the Department of International Integration, Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation. He noted the low demand for graduates of Russian universities in the international labor market and spoke about the government projects aimed at solving the problems of the recognition of Russian education abroad.
Andrei Kortunov, in his speech drew attention to the use of education as an instrument of foreign policy. Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council expressed hope that the exports of Russian education would overtake the growth of Russian arms exports. However, this requires the development of a coordinated program of internationalization of education in Russia.
A number of proposals for the internationalization of education has been offered by other participants of the aforementioned conference. Jan Sadlak, president of the International Ranking Expert Group (IREG) pointed out the need for careful selection of methods and techniques for estimating the level of integration of national education in an international environment.
According to Hans de Wit, Professor of Internationalization of Higher Education, Center for Applied Research in Economics, director of the Center for Higher Education Internationalization (CHEI) of the Catholic University of Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy, it is impossible to consider the integration of education as something stable, since its development largely determined by the competition of universities. Report of Dr. Jason E. Lane, Director of Educational Studies and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Global Education Policy Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY contained detailed statistics on the scientific and academic internationalization in countries throughout the world. Based on these data, Mr. Lane came to the conclusion that the level of globalization of the educational system had an impact not only on economic growth in the state, but also on the success of diplomacy and national security.
Summing up the results of the first day of the conference, I. Timofeev, Program Director of the Russian International Affairs Council, stressed the importance of compliance of initiatives in the education with challenges of the new, more open world and the need to improve the quality rather than quantity of educational activities.
Conference “Internationalization imperatives” (69)
