1.Internationalization Strategy
As the first vocational higher education institution conferring bachelor's degree in Shanghai, Zhongqiao University has set the vision of becoming a leading and globally renowned vocational and technical university in China and has made it its mission to foster virtue through education, meet global challenges and cultivate outstanding industrial talents who are virtuous in character, dedicated to work, and persevered in learning. From 2021 to 2022, the university has reviewed and reinforced its strategy and identified International Vision as the first of four major development strategies.
Internationalization Strategy of the University: With the geographic advantage of the university and its flexibility as a private institution, the university actively explores international cooperative programmes, strengthens cooperation and exchanges with advanced foreign universities, draws on advanced international experience in vocational education, broadens the international vision of faculty and students to improve the teaching level and enhance the ability of operation and internal governance. At the same time, through cooperation with foreign high-end industries and advanced enterprises, the university promotes international integration of industry and education to cultivate outstanding industrial talents with an international perspective.
Internationalization is now embedded in the university's vision, mission, and strategy, and the university is integrating internationalization into all aspects of the university, specifically:
Ÿ Attracting international students;
Ÿ Increasing the international experience of faculty and students;
Ÿ Actively developing international programmes;
Promoting international industry-education integration to cultivate excellent industrial talents with international perspectives.
2.International Development Goals
“The wise man listens to all sides.” “As hundreds of waters flow into the sea, the capacity is important.” The university aims to improve the quality of programme design through international integration of industry and education and international cooperation, thus developing outstanding industrial talents who can meet local and global challenges. From 2021 to 2025, the main goals of the university's international development are:
Ÿ To build 2-3 international cooperative programmes;
Ÿ To increase the proportion of faculty that have overseas experience to 40%;
Ÿ To recruit overseas students;
Ÿ To establish an international exchange college;
To this end, the university has formulated a series of development plans and policies.
Curriculum Internationalization Plan
The university plans to introduce advanced course systems, teaching materials, teaching concepts, and teaching methods, so as to build an international curriculum system that can meet the internationalization needs of students, and enable each undergraduate student to take 2-3 courses from foreign universities.
In addition, the university actively cooperates with international high-level universities and increase investment to introduce 4-5 international online courses and incorporate them into the curriculum of relevant specialties, which will facilitate distance international education, and promote the construction of fully English-taught online courses.
Nurturing Programme for Faculty Internationalization
The university will continue to increase the efforts on bringing in. According to the needs of the university's discipline construction and international curriculum development, the university intends to introduce overseas high-end talents and hire 5-10 additional foreign faculty so as to strengthen the quality of teaching.
The university encourages and supports going out. Based on the needs of internationalization and the overall planning, the university makes full use of and expands the cooperation with overseas universities, which selects 5-10 faculty to go overseas for training every year, encourages backbone faculty to carry out academic exchanges and research cooperation in overseas universities, and strives to improve the internationalization level of the faculty. The university plans to focus on strengthening the training abroad for faculty’s ability to teach in English and train bilingual faculty, so as to support the international curriculum development. Through continuous effort, the university aims to have more than 40% of the full-time faculty with overseas educational experience by the end of 2025.
Student Internationalization Programme
The university plans to expand students' international learning experiences. Relying on the 2+2 and 3+2 joint training programmes, we will open up multi-channels for students to study abroad, and expand the scale of outgoing students, aiming to have at least 1-2 students from each specialty study overseas, so as to promote the internationalization of students experience.
Actively develop programmes for foreign students, such as the programme of teaching Chinese as a foreign language to boost the scale of international students. The university will pay more attention to the Southeast Asia and developing countries, and make full use of overseas relations such as visiting faculty and students, foreign guests and outgoing experts to increase publicity of the university, while taking advantage of the characteristic disciplines and location, and strive to open up the market of international students education in countries along the Belt and Road and ASEAN countries.
The university intends to expand the scale of international students through various ways, and strives to develop 2-3 programmes recruiting international students. In 2025, the number of international students shall exceed 50, so as to realize the diversification of student sources and campus culture.
