INSTITUTION BENEFITS
Value for institutions.
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Meets key institutional drivers, often in accreditation – diversity with exposure to other cultures, promoting active experiential learning among students, attracting students.
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Develops and deepens international partnerships and creates new bridges to local partners, e.g., employers and donors ready to support new ties to their overseas partners.
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Provides true virtual mobility at reasonable cost and is integrated into the college’s core learning processes and standards. Complements other internationalization and digital endeavors.
See our guide to see how students can articulate the benefits of their CLICK experience for employers and other professional audiences.
Colleges need to prepare students for futures in an interconnected world and to thrive amid the challenges of globalization. Typical campus strategies focus on mobility, e.g., faculty exchange for professional development and research, recruiting international students, study abroad for students and increasingly service-learning or internships overseas. Institutional partnerships provide administrative anchors. Dual degrees provide curricular anchors. Yet the gaps are formidable. Do they create deep ties to the curriculum? Do they offer strategic opportunities to connect international resources on campus? Most importantly, do they reach most students? In the US, only 11% of all college graduates do a study abroad of two weeks or more and fewer than 1% of community college students. European mobility rates are higher but still fall short.
Virtual Exchange addresses these gaps for all types of colleges. It empowers the core teaching resources on campus to integrate more students into robust intercultural engagement, while also strengthening student (and faculty) ability to use technology in formal coursework. ALL with the advantage of working in multicultural teams! Being campus-based, it provides any enrolled student with a “two-country course” led by faculty locally and abroad. Teachers and students work in an immersive learning space embedded in for-credit coursework with technological and international boosters.