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Abstract

International partnerships in the higher education sector need to be viewed against a contemporary backdrop of rapid technological advance, knowledge-based global economic developments and the opening up of the education market to international competition - notably through implementation of the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which includes education.

In order to explore the underlying issues involved in international collaborations, the quality of their procedures and end-products, this paper concentrates on a single aspect: Collaborative arrangements between universities. In particular, it focuses on cross-cultural partnerships among universities in Europe, drawing on projects sponsored by the European Union since the early 1990s. It discusses both the advantages and the challenges and pitfalls involved in academics from different European countries collaboratively constructing and presenting courses in Humanities, Cultural Sciences and Business Studies for the benefit of their students. Latterly, such joint courses have relied mainly on electronic forms of teaching and study, which raises further questions about the utilisation of the Web as an educational resource and uses of computer conferencing as a communication tool within such networking arrangements.