Sean Matthews
Director of Studies, School of Modern Languages and Cultures; Coordinator, Knowledge Without Borders Network, University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
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Up Close and Personal!
April 29, 2014
This post is a longer version of an interview with KWBN’s Sean Matthews for the British Council’s ‘Up Close and Personal’ column in the Education Intelligence newsletter. The full interview can be accessed here. EI: What is your favorite conference and why? SM: I realize it’s a bit of a cliché, but I’d say either the last …
Beyond Global Citizenship: Reflections on the U21/KWBN Global Citizenship Workshop
April 2, 2014
‘Global Citizenship’ is a term we come across more and more in relation to university missions or graduate attributes and outcomes, but one which most of us would struggle to define in anything but the broadest terms. If pushed, we would probably describe a Global Citizen as someone with particular qualities of ethical awareness, perhaps …
Tricampus Team Presents to Asia-Pacific Association for International Education (APAIE) 2014 in Seoul, Korea.
March 26, 2014
There was another landmark for the University of Nottingham last week with a panel drawn from colleagues based at each of the three main campuses, who collaborated in a presentation at the annual conference, in Seoul, of the Asia-Pacific Association for International Education (APAIE). The organizers set aside a full session for the group, who …
Overwhelming Questions: Thoughts on the UNMC Research Priorities Workshop, April 30 2013
May 17, 2013
Our UNMC Research Priorities Workshop brought into focus many elements of the sheer range of research taking place on the campus. It gave colleagues the opportunity to explore concepts and themes which unite our work across the disparate disciplines and faculties. Coming to the process from an Arts/Social Sciences background, I found a surprising level …
Shooting Elephants on the International Branch Campus II
February 1, 2013
In the previous post I began the work of facing up to the existence of some elephants on the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. The first group of elephants were the metaphorical ‘elephants in the room’, those sensitive and intractable issues about life on the international campus which we all know but rarely discuss. The …
Shooting Elephants on the International Branch Campus I
November 2, 2012
I have recently become preoccupied by two elephants. The first is the ‘elephant in the room’: the enormous problem which everyone knows about but which no-one wants to discuss because it is too vast even to conceive or articulate, much less resolve. Let sleeping elephants lie. The second elephant is the unfortunate beast in George …
Total Campus (TM)
October 4, 2012
In the previous post, ‘Post-Purchase Dissonance and the Higher Education Product’ we began to think about, specifically, international campus activity in relation to the unusually long and changing experience of the educational product. Interviews with student informants have consistently given even greater emphasis than we had anticipated to the importance of peer-to-peer support networks (formal …
Post-Purchase Dissonance and the Higher Education ‘Product’
The research literature on ‘Buyer Behaviour’, particularly in marketing studies, consistently draws attention to the whole buying process rather than just the moment of purchase decision. The function of marketing is to ‘prepare’ the buyer for the purchase, by informing or educating about choices, and steering towards the vendor’s own product. Once the product is …
Return of the Civilizing Mission
July 6, 2012
At the recent Observatory on Borderless Higher Education ‘Global Forum’ in Kuala Lumpur, ‘New Players and New Directions: The Challenges of International Branch Campus management’, there was much to digest about current thinking concerning Transnational Education. The delegate list itself was something of an internationalisation ‘Who’s Who’, and the programme offered a rich set of …