Lingnan hosts Symposium on Higher Education Research Enhancing Students’ International Learning

The Lingnan University (LU) Institute of Policy Studies, together with the National Chengchi University (NCCU) College of Education, and the Asia Pacific Higher Education Research Partnership (APHERP), and supported by the Alliance of Asian Liberal Arts Universities (AALAU), organised The Symposium on Internationalisation and Quality Management in Higher Education 2022 on 12 March 2022.

In their welcoming remarks, Prof Chao Yu Guo, Dean of NCCU College of Education, and Prof Joshua Mok Ka-ho, Vice-President and Dean of the LU School of Graduate Studies, expressed their appreciation to this collaborative platform for academic exchanges during the pandemic, as well as welcoming the speakers and participants.

The symposium offered a platform for distinguished scholars from Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, India, the UK, and the US to discuss the internationalisation and quality assurance in higher education. In the keynote speeches, Prof Deane Neubauer from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, who recently received an honorary doctoral degree from LU, reviewed and discussed the quality issues in global higher education in the complicated context of the pandemic and new technologies. A second keynote speaker, Prof Wenqin Shen from the Graduate School of Education, Peking University, introduced his latest study on Chinese doctoral students’ non-degree international mobility, and its impact on the development of their academic careers.

Topics such as international education and students in China, quality assurance and enhancement in higher education, and higher education development in different regions of Asia, as well as Chinese universities’ international branch campuses in Europe, and international students’ pandemic experiences in China, were addressed by the symposium panels.

The dialogue session, a highlight of the Symposium, was chaired by Prof Angela Yung Chi Hou (Associate Dean of the NCCU College of Education), and guests were Prof Mok, Prof Catherine Montgomery (Deputy Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Health, Durham University), Prof Ian Holliday (Vice-President of the University of Hong Kong), and Prof Martin Lockett (Dean of Faculty of Business, University of Nottingham Ningbo China). The speakers and audiences discussed issues of international education during the pandemic, including the internationalisation of the curriculum, educational technologies and inequality issues, and the localisation and contextualisation of international education from both Eastern and Western perspectives.

The whole-day event in hydrid mode attracted around 230 participants on-site at LU’s main campus, and online, assembling faculty and PhD students of AALAU partner institutions, including the NCCU, Tunghai University in Taiwan, the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts of India, and the Northeast Normal University in China. The international symposium demonstrated Lingnan and its partners’ success in putting together the technology-enabled platform to enrich students’ international learning.