Internationalization of Higher Education: The Activity-Process at Malaysian Technical University

Abstract

Internationalizing higher education has long been on the agenda of most countries. The purpose of internationalization is to improve the quality and relevance of international standards. Given today’s interrelated and interdependent world, internationalization has proven to be a useful tool for higher educational institutions to benchmarking and improve innovative solutions for continuous challenges. Thus, higher education institutions need to strengthen their quality through its primary functions to reach a certain level of internationalization. This paper highlighted the most common practices of internationalization of higher education at the national and sector, institutional and faculty, and individual levels. With a view in identifying approaches and best practices in Malaysia, it is critically reviewed the relevant approaches to internationalization that are covered in the scholarly literature review from the past few decades. The review has revealed the chronology of international education – internationalization from the past until this century and its meaning that carries the concept of internationalization of higher education. The review also identified the approaches to internationalization which are the activity and process approach where has been applied in the internationalization of higher education stratification level. Therefore, this paper will catalyse the change in the understanding of the world that strongly focuses on internationalizing the higher institutions.