The College of Education’s new semester began with an excellent lecture delivered by Professor Heidi Ross from Indiana University in USA on February 21, 2011.
    The topic of the lecture was the Educational International Exchange and Cooperation (EIEC), which is the key component of the internationalization of higher education. In the lecture, Professor Ross explained what the EIEC is and how Indiana University conducts EIEC affairs. Based on a “spider web” metaphor which was applied to illustrate today’s global connections and interdependence, Professor Ross elaborated the International Strategic Plan of Indiana University. The International Strategic Plan of Indiana University has four parts, and Prof. Ross especially introduced the parts of exchanges, affiliations, and international strategic partnerships and serving the international needs of the State of Indiana. She pointed out that the IU’s strategic plan was motivated by global competition and shared global problems as well as the need of global learning which was driven by the economic and educational development of the State of Indiana. The university could benefit from implementing the strategic plan in enhancing the international prestige and fulfilling the missions of teaching, researching and service in a better way. However, there are also some obstacles preventing internationalizing the campuses, such as the lack of full-time senior-level coordinators or campus-wide committees to advance internationalization, the absence of campus-wide internationalization strategy, the neglect of requires of global learning for students and others.
    After the lecture, Professor Ross engaged in further discussion with the audience on some important issues, like the positive and negative effect of internationalization, immigrant education, identity conflict in global thinking, goals of global learning, implementation of the campus-wide internationalization strategies and so on. Both the lecture and the discussion provided a global perspective in analyzing the internationalization of higher education and were highly praised by the audience.