Best Practices of Engineering Education Internationalization in a Russian Top-20 University

摘要

Top world universities apply complex internationalization strategies to keep a sustainable leadership confirmed by the global rankings such as QS, THE, ARWU, or to improve their position in these rankings. Russian universities are not an exception and the analysis of the websites of Russian Top-20 universities (according to the National Ranking of Russian Universities, 9 universities of this Top-20 list are engineering universities) demonstrates their strong internationalization infrastructure. Tracking success stories and best practices of such universities using accurate statistics is a useful tool for sharing their internationalization experiences, finding matching points for cooperation and predicting of their competitiveness potential in the global higher education community. This paper summarizes 5 years of best internationalization practices and statistics of a Russian Engineering University in the national Top-20 list. The statistical data include dynamics of international students by their total number and country of origin; the statistical analysis of international delegations; the data about foreign professors and guest lecturers; international conferences and other events; the statistics of academic exchange and grants. Best practices and internationalization success stories are correlated with this statistical information and are generally analyzed and characterized using these data as the background to become more formalized and easily shared with other universities. Apparently good results have been achieved through the following practices: step-by-step collaboration plans with selected top universities in the USA, Europe and Asia; focused Federal Government funding for joint projects (research, guest lecturers and joint conferences) with top world scientists in approved development priority areas; success in Asia through personalized activities carried out by the University's Honorary Professors from China, South Korea and other Asia-Pacific countries; training hundreds of University faculty in the top US and European universities; networking with regional, national and global academic and business partners. Another focus is given to the best practices in the global engineering education environment including collaboration with ASEE and IGIP (such as hosting IGIP conferences and success in IGIP International Engineering Educator Program ING PAED IGIP, plenary session at ASEE International Forum). These 5 years of activities resulted in achieving the Top-150 position in the QS BRICS list (while the University was not listed in any international rankings before), a 3 fold increase in the number of international students, and the infrastructural changes in the university such as creation of new internationalization infrastructure and a multilingual environment to achieve sustainability in internationalization growth.