Institution: Research Consortium for the Sustainable Promotion of International Education (RECSIE)
Country: Japan
Partnership Type: Institutional Partner
Since: 2020
Contact: Professor Shingo Ashizawa
Website: http://recsie.or.jp/
Founded in January 2014, the Research Consortium for the Sustainable Promotion of International Education (RECSIE) was established with the aim of making contributions to the internationalization of higher education and promoting a research agenda that goes beyond the borders of our individual universities.
It is a critical mission for higher education institutions to nurture global talent who can succeed in today’s rapidly globalizing knowledge-based society. In recent years, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has launched many initiatives to help achieve this mission. These initiatives include "300,000 International Students Plan" (2008), "Student Exchange Support Program (Scholarships for Short-term Study in Japan and abroad)" (2009), "Global 30" (2009), "Re-Inventing Japan" (2011), "Go Global Japan" (2012), and "Top Global University" (2014) projects.
Against this backdrop, an urgent task for Japanese universities has been to collaborate with universities around the world, establishing joint teaching and joint degrees and creating an environment where international and Japanese students can study together. In such an environment, students are able to exchange views with classmates from diverse backgrounds and acquire communication and problem-solving skills that help them form new values. At the same time, establishing institutional strategies and developing effective assessment programs for promoting internationalization has also become the main focus of universities’ long-term planning.
Research conducted worldwide in the fields of international education and the internationalization of higher education has recently shifted focus from a quantitative analysis of outputs to a broader, qualitative analysis of outcomes and impacts. In Japan, however, such research is hampered by an excessive reliance on time-bound public funding which is competitively allocated to researchers. This system hinders the continuity and autonomy of research projects. Therefore, a new structure is that enables more sustainable research on international education is called for.
RECSIE's Research Consortium breaks through the borders of individual universities and promotes the following research agenda:
- Research on global talent (globally minded workforce) and learning outcome analysis
- Research on the evaluation of organizations and institutions concerned with university internationalization and international strategy
- Comparative research on worldwide student exchange programs and student mobility (inbound and outbound) policies
- Research on systems that promote international inter-university cooperation and educational collaboration
- Research for the promotion of sustainable international education
Through RECSIE's research on these issues, RECSIE endeavours to contribute to the internationalization of higher education in Japan, and to the development of global talent (globally minded workforce).
