SYSTEMIC UNIVERSITY CHANGE TOWARDS INTERNATIONALISATION for Academia The aim of the project is to raise awareness and shift the internal culture of our institutions towards internationalization, thus creating a systemic change in our institutions and in European Higher Education. SUCTI Academia is built on SUCTI, which was is a three-year initiative (2016-2019) approved for funding under the European Commission’s Erasmus+ – KA2 Strategic Partnerships for higher education focusing on the internationalisation of administrative staff. The project was coordinated by the URV, Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona, Spain). SUCTI has already shown that systemic change through trainings for administrative staff is a key to success of the international university and the impact of this change has been measured and assessed. Shifting a culture is only possible through internationalizing all groups of higher education institutions can we truly talk about international universities. While many activities exist for internationalising students and the predecessor project SUCTI concentrated on the administrative staff, SUCTI Academia now aims at empowering the third pillar, the academic staff, by providing them with knowledge and skills related to their university’s internationalisation process. Investments have been made in the internationalization of this group in an attempt to increase their impact on more international research and publications, more internationalized courses, more international programs. However, in order to perform those international tasks, the academics (scholars, researchers, teachers) need to have the right preparation, training, skills and knowledge to do it properly. Courses delivered at SUCTI partner universities also showed that there is a clear need among academics to get training on internationalisation. Academic staff is expected to internationalize both the teaching as well as research in their academic work while it may happen that they not equipped with the right tools and skills to deliver it properly. What is more, if they are convinced of the importance and added value of internationalisation they can become genuine change agents. In this way, they can make a key contribution to the overall objective of the project which is to transform the internal mind-set of universities and enable them to become truly internationalised institutions.
SUCTIA was about empowering the academic staff, by better understanding how institutions can provide them with knowledge and skills that will support their university’s internationalization process. It was also about raising awareness and shifting the internal culture of our institutions towards internationalization, thus creating a systemic change in our institutions and in European Higher Education. We wanted the universities to be internationalized from within, so that every single academic could be a part of the process of internationalization and support in their own way and that internationalization is not only about mobility. There are still some groups of academics that can’t travel abroad or can’t speak any foreign language and SUCTIA training is also for them, so that they could be a part of internationalization within this internationalization at home initiative.
SUCTIA-European Commission-funded project aimed to raise awareness about, and shift the internal culture of, European HEI towards internationalisation, thus creating systemic change within these institutions and in European higher education more broadly. Building on the success of its 2016–2019 predecessor project – Systemic University Change Towards Internationalisation (SUCTI) – SUCTIA aimed to empower academic staff by developing a peer training model similar to that of SUCTI - providing academics with knowledge and skills related to their university’s internationalisation process. Investments have been made in the internationalisation of academic staff in an attempt to increase their impact on more international research and publications, more internationalised courses, more international programs. However, in order to perform those international tasks, academics (scholars, researchers, teachers) need to have the right preparation, skills, knowledge and support. The aim of the SUCTIA project was to raise awareness and shift the internal culture of our institutions towards internationalisation, thus creating a systemic change in our institutions and in the European Higher Education.