Ede Christian University of Applied Sciences (CHE) is centrally located in The Netherlands and ranked first for thirteen years in a row as best medium sized university in The Netherlands. CHE offers predominantly undergraduate programmes in Business, HRM, ICT, Journalism, Communication, Nursing, Social Work and Education. In addition to that we offer a few graduate programmes.
In the previous years we’ve worked hard to professionalize our international office, to extend our international partnerships and to integrate cross-cultural competences and internationalisation in the curricula of our departments. The coming years we’d like to continue and extend our exchange programmes and increasingly integrate international modules (by blended learning and in cooperation with partners) in our curricula.
Our ambition is to extend the amount of MA programmes, and we are considering to develop one or two English taught MA programmes in cooperation with our international partners. In order to be able to codevelop graduate programmes with partner institutions, we’ve worked hard on solid partnerships in the previous years. This has resulted in long-established partnerships with institutions in and outside Europe. These partnerships do not only focus on exchange programmes, but we’ve also developed courses in cooperation with these partners and we learn from our best practices. One example would be an International HRM course. Students from our university and a partner university in Romania (Vest) get classes Int. HRM at their own university, but they will meet each other for ten days in Romania and they work in mixed project teams to solve a real HR problem for a company.
In the near future we’d like to explore further cooperation possibilities with partner institutions, international NGO’s and businesses. Therefore we’d welcome the opportunity to participate in the Erasmus Key Action 2 programme (partnership for Cooperation and exchanges of practices and Erasmus Mundus Joint Master degrees). It would fit our institutional internationalisation strategy (see below, goal 4).
In addition to this, CHE is in the midst of a process of modernisation of our education. Given the need for more flexibility - an increasing number of our student population is studying part-time - more modules will be offered in a blended learning environment. Normally it is very difficult to expose this student population to an international learning environment, since they are not able to travel for longer period of time. An international blended learning environment will give new opportunities for these students to fully meet our internationalisation goals (mentioned below).
The participation in the Erasmus Programme fits perfectly well in our institutional internationalisation strategy. Among others, we’ve formulated the following goals that are relevant for the Erasmus Programme:
- Students should be able to work in a cross-cultural setting, both in The Netherlands and abroad
- Diversity among our student population should be stimulated
- Sustainability is a key value of CHE and should be anchored in our internationalisation agenda
- CHE strives for increasing cooperation with strategic international partners – both educational institutions and other strategic partners in Europe (ngo’s, companies and others)