I would like to submit the good practice of the international academic cooperation between Chinese Culture University and its international partner universities worldwide. The practices include the language exchange/training program and the joint degree program
In order to cultivate students' foreign language ability, to enhance their sense of globalization and internationalization and to advance their competiveness, we started seeking cooperative partner universities and establishing international exchane programs with them. Chinese Culture University has a long history of working with its international sister universities because the founder of the university paid high emphasis to its international cooperation, and the insitution has a big school of foreign language, which offers 6 languge BA, MA or Ph.D degrees. There are English, Japanese, Korean, German, French, and Russian.
For the language exchange program, each year or each semester we send students outbound to our international partner universities and accept incoming students from them as well. Students can choose to go to the English speaking universities like the US, or European universities or Asian University, but it all depends on their foreign language ability, and they have to pass the screening evaluation of their ability through their application process. As for the time period of their study, it will be from 6 months to 1 year, but whether they go study for one year or one semester will have to depend on the agreements made between 2 universities, so the agreement might vary from school to school.
As for joint degree program, the student can apply to study in some cooperative universities which offer the courses or design especially for the joint degree program with our university. The credits tranferring and recignition between 2 universities are discussed and official agreements are signed. How and how much the tuition paying should be done is another issue that needs to be discussed.
The objective of the practice presentation is for people to understand what is being done in Chinese Culture University of Taiwan in terms of its international cooperation. These practices actually are been conducted in many universities in many countries, to my knowledge, however, there are some variations.
Seek to cooperate with partner universities and establishing international exchane programs with them.
For the language exchange program, each year or each semester we send students outbound to our international partner universities and accept incoming students from them as well. Students can choose to go to the English speaking universities like the US, or European universities or Asian University, but it all depends on their foreign language ability, and they have to pass the screening evaluation of their ability through their application process. As for the time period of their study, it will be from 6 months to 1 year, but whether they go study for one year or one semester will have to depend on the agreements made between 2 universities, so the agreement might vary from school to school.
As for joint degree program, the student can apply to study in some cooperative universities which offer the courses or design especially for the joint degree program with our university. The credits tranferring and recignition between 2 universities are discussed and official agreements are signed. How and how much the tuition paying should be done is another issue that needs to be discussed.
The language exchange program has been ongoing for so many years and it is still working very actively with the sister universities. Students do change in a positive way after their study abroad year. Their learning attitude is much more active and appreciating, the language ability improved, and they become willing to do volunteer work to help other international of foreign students, since they had the experience of accepting help from others when they were abroad.
Of course, there are minor negative results as well. Some students did not have a good accomplishments abroad and had some bad experience since they were still young and short of some social or person to person skills. They felt hurt by foreign friends or foreign culture.
The problems with the exchange program or joint degree program are mainly about credit recognition and the assurance of higher education quality. There are some organization devoting on this perspective, but due to the fact that Taiwan is not recognized as a country, we have some difficulty particiapating in it. For example, UMAP is a good practice, and the participating role of Taiwan is Taiwan national university, but not out Ministry of Education, or even our govvernment. There are a lot more need to be done here.
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