A first analysis of the experience and educational impact of the international cooperation at the Facultat d'Informàtica de Barcelona

Abstract

In this paper, we present the first analysis of the main international cooperation actions carried out by the Facultat d'Informàtica de Barcelona (FIB), from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech (UPC), in its almost forty-five years of history. The wide range and diversity of these actions have been consolidated in the operation of the FIB and have improved the academic activity and the educational offer of the school. It is important to highlight that the decentralized organisation of the UPC allows each school to organise and manage its educational offer and its internationalisation policies with a notable degree of independence.

In this institutional context, the identification and classification of the FIB's international cooperation activities, and the study of their relationships with the educational activities of the school have allowed us to prepare a micro-level type of study that is rarely present in the literature (Renc-Roe & Roxå, 2014).

Based on the analysis of institutional documentation, both from FIB and UPC, and the testimonials of the different people involved in the international cooperation overall experience of the FIB, we first list the internationalisation actions and then we classify and evaluate them in their respective context. The classification is done along three axes: 1) the set of internationalisation descriptors proposed by Guillaume & Vanholsbeeck (2014); 2) the higher education internationalisation cycle proposed by Perez-Encinas (2018) as an extension of Knight's (2004); and 3) the relevant historical periods of the FIB emerging from our study, from 1976 up to 2017. In addition, we also analyse various academic indicators (students enrolled per year, graduates, access grades, etc.) and we relate them to the available international cooperation indicators (number of students in incoming and outgoing mobility, number of agreements, etc.). We have faced in this task some difficulties due to incomplete or inconsistent data, luckily not central to our purpose.

As a final result, we have obtained a quantitative and qualitative analytical description of the evolution of the FIB in the studied period. It points out the most innovative and pioneering milestones of its activity from the point of view of international cooperation, which have been influenced by the consecutive FIB management teams leading the school, and the social and institutional context of the analysed period.

Our research visualises and highlights for the first time the internationalisation work carried out by the various FIB management teams and the administrative staff involved. It also shows the correlation between internationalisation efforts and the improvement of educational activity, the core mission of a university school like FIB. Significant examples are: the international approach followed in the design, update and accreditation of FIB’s degrees; the increasing offer of FIB education provided in English, from several selected subjects up to some degrees exclusively taught in English; the collaborative design and teaching of international master degree programs.

The research procedure followed, the undertaken classifications and the analytical results obtained will help FIB to improve both its future international cooperation strategy and the mechanisms for collecting and analysing the relevant information. Hopefully, the results obtained could also be used as a reference for other university schools.