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Article Excerpt
This paper discusses the relatively new phenomenon of university education faculties offering offshore education. The analogy, 'flying in, flying out--captures the intensity of such offshore experiences for visiting academics, and contrasts their professional experiences against expatriate academics. This paper reports on case studies of two academics from different parts of Australia with different research and teaching experiences, observing how they perceived cultural value differences relating to content, pedagogy and education, and how they negotiated the dissonance which resulted. While both participants identified areas for ongoing fine tuning at the institutional level, both felt that the offshore teaching experience had helped them to expand their global outlooks and facilitate a more internationalised curriculum planning and delivery.
Keywords
higher education
offshore programs
values
cross cultural training
internationalisation
international communication
Provision of offshore education by Australian universities
The provision of education by Australian universities to international students was valued at A$5.03 billion in 2003. This service represents Australia's third largest service export and fourteenth largest export overall (IDP Education Australia, 2004a). International students either come to Australia to undertake courses or complete units while overseas, often in their own countries. Transnational education, or offshore education as is commonly used in Australia, refers to the provision of academic courses to students who are physically situated overseas. This provision of offshore education, particularly in Asia, has grown dramatically in the last decade with British, Australian and American institutions being leaders of foreign educational providers, and with New Zealand institutions being recent players (Gribble & Ziguras, 2003). In 2004, the 51,833 offshore students enrolled in Australian universities (a 14.4 per cent increase over 2003) represented 27.8 per cent of all international students. The four major sources of offshore students, namely Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and China, contributed more than twenty-five per cent of all these offshore students (Commonwealth of Australia, 2004). Even without including China, the demand for offshore education in Asian countries is estimated to rise to more than 480,000 student places by 2020 (IDP Education Australia, 2004b).
While the pursuit of a 'Western' tertiary degree may be highly regarded by some Asian students, several factors might have contributed to this boom in offshore education in Asia. These include advances in information and communication technologies, the global economic slump in the early 2000s, and the government-initiated move in Australia towards a corporate approach in higher education governance (Marginson, 2002).
This trend can have an impact on the traditional work of academics who are required to teach offshore. Allport (2000, p. 42) observed, for example, that 'this has placed inevitable stress on university staff and has also strained the high quality delivery of programs'. According to Marginson (2002, p. 22), the commercialisation of university degrees has had some unexpected--and in his view, negative--consequences: 'Australian universities became aggressively entrepreneurial, and their business-related functions, pursued behind and around academic functions of teaching and research, began to dwarf traditional faculty.' Schapper and Mayson (2004) described this shift as the 'Taylorisation' of teaching and learning, based on mechanical engineer Frederick Taylor's principles of scientific management, 'exemplified by the growing trend towards standardisation of delivery and curricula' (p. 189). In their view, the corporatisation of the university system constitutes 'the greatest attack on academic work today ... the wresting of intellectual labour from academic staff by corporate decision makers, and the subsequent relegation of academics to the role of process labourers' (p.195). It is, however, an open question as to how experiences of different faculties or similar faculties in other universities negotiate similar offshore experiences. As Marginson (2002) noted, the greatest growth in international students has been in the areas of business studies, information technology and related disciplines. Experiences in these faculties may vary markedly from those of academics in an education faculty, where staff members typically have teaching qualifications in addition to their areas of specialisation.
It is important to emphasise that working abroad whether it be in the field of education or any other area of activity has long been a matter of detailed study by scholars in the field of international human resource management. The well-being and productivity of academics teaching overseas can be expected to fall within models of expatriate performance in the broad area of international human resource management. These have emphasised the preparation of workers in the transition to working and living offshore, understanding local customs and cultures and re-entering the home workforce.
While there is a growing body of literature dealing with offshore higher education, there is a relative dearth of research inquiring into the specific challenges faced by academics teaching in such programs for short periods of time. Stays lasting only a few days each are likely to be too short periods to allow for the phases of adjustment to foreign cultures to be experienced, as outlined in Hofstede's (1997) 'acculturation curve' and March's (1997) 'W curve of cross-cultural adjustment'. In fact, most of what has been written about such offshore teaching programs has been undertaken by the visiting lecturers themselves. These writings, while providing anecdotal accounts, are unable to explore patterns in offshore teaching experience and also likely to lack the critical distance for more reliable interpretations to be made (Gribble & Ziguras, 2003).
Unlike teaching international students in the home country, where the academic is part of the dominant discourse (Bodycott & Walker, 2000; Dunn & Wallace, 2003), the offshore experience can position the academic as a minority in a foreign culture.The cultural differences involved in such professional practice can be unique in nature, as more pressure is placed on the academic to respond to the particular culture in which he or she practises (Bodycott & Walker, 2000). In addition, the academic is likely to experience high anxiety levels, related to preparation for the experience; approaches to teaching and learning; shared meanings; resources; isolation; and family and lifestyle disruption, to name a few. Clearly, researching the experiences of academics teaching offshore for short periods of time will be a valuable addition to the international human resource management literature referred to above and will...
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