Internationalisation Strategy 2020-2024

Measures for supporting inter-institutional internationalisation

Supplementing the maintenance and expansion of binational relations, multilateral cooperation is growing increasingly urgent and formative in the globalised academic landscape. Internationalisation of Bielefeld University considers this as follows:

• We opened a liaison office in Guadalajara (Mexico) in the autumn of 2022 to strengthen our excellent research cooperations.
• The already existing cooperations with strategic partner institutions within and outside of Europe and the universities in the NEOLAiA network are subject to systematic expansion.
• Internationality is increasingly anchored in the curriculum as a relevant study element by expansion of international courses, in particular those offered in the English language.
• Multilingualism and the teaching of intercultural competence as an added value of international cooperation are being pushed as a task of “internationalisation at home”.
• Demand-oriented offers and further education opportunities within the meaning of participatory internationalisation are made available to all members of Bielefeld University.

Internationalisation is a dynamic process comprising different forms of international cooperation.

Strengthening partnerships in the intra- and trans-European regions

As shown in the figure below, Bielefeld University’s internationalisation strategy strives for positioning as a:

• European university
• European strategic partner in association with the Franco-German University, the NEOLAiA university network, and leading European universities
• Global strategic partner of leading universities outside of Europe.

EditInternationalisation thrives on international encounters, making increased individual mobility in studies, teaching, research, and administration its main goal.

Growth happens both in quantity and quality:

• Increasing digitalisation strengthens internationalisation “at home” as well as in European and trans-European higher education. The “Erasmus without Papers” (EWP) initiative digitally renews and manages all of the approx. 370 “Inter-Institutional Agreements” we maintain with our approx. 230 partner universities.
• Implementation of a European Student Card (ESC) is going to harmonise the interfaces of the various European universities, simplifying the administrative processes and credit transfer modalities.
• Understanding of national borders and knowledge locations is being redefined by expansion of sophisticated digital and multinational offerings (innovative teaching, learning, and research formats, collaborative online courses with colleagues from universities abroad, transnational learning and research teams) and improvement of the infrastructure in the faculties: Virtual space knows no geographical advantages or disadvantages; capital cities are losing some of their attraction.
• New projects are launched online and advanced synchronously and asynchronously with colleagues around the world in order to intensify internationalisation “at home”.
• The NEOLAiA network pilots joint degrees with curricular mobility phases, e.g., in the area of “Diversity and Inclusion Studies”. Further development of diversity-specific measures to increase mobility (by physical and digital accessibility) also is to explicitly encourage people who have doubts about taking the step abroad and prepare them for mobility measures in a targeted manner.
• Virtual or hybrid exchanges with partner universities are also going to cover new forms of mobility, e.g., “virtual mobility” or “blended mobility” in future. This not only promotes the heterogeneity of the student and teaching body, but also actively makes internationally relevant contributions to inclusion in practice.
• The effect of internationalisation implies long-term visions and strategies. Bielefeld University is committed to implementing and supporting its university policy goals of sustainability and climate protection. International “virtual and blended mobility” as well as raising of awareness of environmentally friendly travel is to contribute to rendering international mobility greener. Information on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is fed into the available advisory services. In addition to this, incentive systems are being created, e.g., by introduction of climate scholarships.

Research always happens in global competition for best arguments and best solutions. This very competition brings about both the profiling of universities and increasing specialisation of researchers in order to play a formative role in the international academic discourse in these profile fields.

This renders internationalisation as well as acquisition of excellent cooperation partners necessary. Competitive research on the highest level and global cooperation are, in fact, two sides of the same coin.

The Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), the first “Institute for Advanced Study” in Germany, was the nucleus of the Bielefeld reform university and remains one of its beacons for outstanding international research and networking to this day.

The Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS), founded under the auspices of Bielefeld University, the Bielefeld International Research Training Groups, and the university’s large research networks prove that internationalisation is both a prerequisite and an expression of outstanding research and teaching.

EditBielefeld University strengthens its international lighthouse projects with bespoke internationalisation programmes, thereby increasing its attractiveness for excellent international junior and senior academics. This includes the following measures:

• Bielefeld University pursues an active international recruitment policy within the scope of its excellence strategy. Bielefeld University facilitates research stays of different durations by guests to Bielefeld and by researchers from Bielefeld at international research institutions. Bielefeld University offers attractive positions for renowned junior and senior academics from Germany and abroad as well as for international doctoral students in its graduate programmes. The International Guest Lectureship Programme is being expanded at the same time to enable lecturers from abroad to gain teaching experience at Bielefeld University and to establish initial contacts with future employers on site.
• The goal continues to be increasing the number of ERC grants and Humboldt Fellows. Academic contacts abroad are intensified and expanded by supporting bottom-up initiatives to increase Bielefeld University’s attraction on foreign students, doctoral candidates, and experienced researchers.
• Administrative processes are going to increasingly need to be handled in the English language in future.
• Integration of international partners into the existing networks, the research strategy, and the teaching profile of the individual faculties and departments will be further deepened.
• An incentive system for publication of “open source” contributions in English (in cooperation with the university library) is going to be created to support publications in the English language, in particular in subject cultures where this is not yet a matter of course.
• An incentive system is going to be created to promote the organisation of and participation in international conferences (in cooperation with the International Office).
• The international reputation of Bielefeld University is to be enhanced and an active contribution is to be made to solving global challenges by active participation in international cooperation projects – both as a coordinating and participating institution – with simultaneous, competitively necessary further development of the digitalisation of research management. The university’s interdisciplinary, discrimination-critical, and cosmopolitan research and teaching principles provide the optimal framework for this.