Brenda Gourley: Internationalism brings opportunity but opens up a whole new world

Much has been written recently about diversity and the implications of multiculturalism.

Much has been written recently about diversity and the implications of multiculturalism. The debate has been underway in education for some time, and when we learn that Eton has employed an imam and offers Arabic as a subject, times have indeed changed. It is a pity that such drastic circumstances had to be experienced before we gave these matters consideration. I wonder if Eton offers Chinese?

Many of our universities have long had a spirit of internationalism at least, and have encouraged students from diverse backgrounds and many different countries to study with them.

Internationalisation has meant many different things to different universities. Mostly it is conceived of as preparing students for life and work in an international context. If their university experience is one where they mix with people from different parts of the world and the curriculum is broad, they ideally should come to understand and appreciate different world views as well as the concerns of people who come from different circumstances.

As international students become more numerous and university places more competitive, we should not be surprised that this situation becomes a hotly contested arena.

For the most part the people who come as international students to our universities are rich. A small number have scholarships but the fact of the matter is that this can only ever be a minority. For ordinary people, such opportunities are out of reach.

The world of technology can provide some of the solutions. Distance learning (though not entirely open) is no longer only the business of institutions such as the Open University. More and more universities are adding to their offerings the possibility of students being, physically, in different parts of the world. This gives a whole new dimension to the meaning of "international" student and allows the poorer amongst them to participate fully in their studies from their home country.

It is now possible for universities to have "virtual" campuses where students meet in virtual reality and have wonderfully rich seminars with tutor and students all accessing the same information, adding to a common whiteboard, and listening to each other unimpeded by visual prejudices. This means that residential universities with offerings in a whole range of subjects that have participants from all over the world in virtual mode find their courses hugely enriched by the diversity of the students involved in study and discussion. Currently, the Open University has more than 200,000 students using their conferencing activity and at any one time more than 10,000 students are online, discussing discipline-specific subject matter and learning as much from each other as they may from the material. Gender, class, religious and ethnic differences are mostly opaque and the world seems to me a better place for it.

We do have to remember, however, that education is never value-free and the curriculum must be sensitive to this. It probably means that our staff will have to come from different parts of the world too. One cannot hope to provide material that is sensitive to many cultures and values when one has a monocultural staff base.

Nothing is ever that simple. The process has begun and it will be interesting to watch how it unfolds. Global citizens are what we need and universities are playing their parts.

Brenda Gourley is Vice-Chancellor of The Open University