Recommendations and Tools to Promote Internationalisation at Home in Higher Education

Introduction

The main aim of this chapter is to share different resources and recommendations that contribute to the internationalization of the curriculum, especially at home, by means of transnational learning through telecollaboration in global teacher education with the idea to promote such international virtual exchange in initial teacher training not only addressed to teacher trainers, but also to researchers, pre-service, and in-service teachers with a rationale followed by specific indications for the case of eTwinning. For that, the background section offers a review of the concept of internationalization, including the so-called ‘internationalization at home’, related to that of ‘transnationalization’, as well as how programs like Erasmus+, particularly Key Action 2 (KA2), or the measures of this European initiative supporting cooperation among organizations and institutions, commit to it and their impact on foreign language policies, especially at a European level that later is translated to national and regional legal documents.

Then, a section of policies on internationalization at university levels starts by reviewing different strategic plans which focus on internationalization as a key axis like EU Strategic Plan 2020-2024 and Spanish Strategy for Science, Technology, and Innovation 2021-2027 EECTI 2021-2027. This section continues with a review of the three main university rankings worldwide, QS, THE, ARWU (Quacquarelli Symonds, Times Higher Education, and Academic Ranking of World Universities, respectively), and the position of Spanish universities in them. Later, a particular case of a university that is included in such three rankings is presented, and also the internationalization policies at the regional level in which this university is contextualized are explored. This section comes to an end with the impact of such policies on higher education communities as well as some opportunities the abovementioned offer. Afterwards, the authors focus on those specific resources and recommendations, starting by redefining the concept of ‘internationalization at home’ and Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) to explain their potential. Then, the contribution of eTwinning, now within the European School Education Platform (ESEP), to these two concepts is explained. Before the conclusions, the authors finish with recommendations and examples of good practices and experiences from already implemented eTwinning projects that permit internationalization at home and somehow lead to the success of both issues.

Therefore, the specific objectives of this paper are: (i) to review and define the concept of internationalization, including the one called ‘at home’; (ii) to share the contribution of some programs policies to such concept; (iii) to review different internationalization strategies at global, European (including in European Higher Education Area or EHEA, Eurydice and European Education Area 2025), Spanish new Act of Education and the already mentioned EECTI 2021-2027 Strategy for Science), and regional level, and the position of Spanish universities in the three main rankings worldwide; (iv) to examine the impact of internationalization at home on students, academic and administrative staff; (v) to explore the opportunities and potential of internationalization at home through COIL experiences (especially dealing with the case of eTwinning); and (vi) to share recommendations and provide examples of good practices based on the authors’ experiences that fostered internationalization at home through eTwinning, and the success of such kind of projects.