UK/Egypt Trans-national Education Partnerships Grants

Objective/Contributions:

All three partners are strongly interested in the development of TNE in the field of Environmental Management and Sustainability.  This is an area of significant global concern and one where mutual collaboration can lead to opportunities for new curricula in the future. However, formal TNE in the short term faces many institutional challenges; therefore our approach is to focus on the development of short courses designed to engage industry and commercial organisations, through a successful commercial offering to the market, start to explore expanding the training offering into the curricula, either through joint delivery or other TNE model.

The approach is thus a stepping stone approach to TNE, through the provision of accredited professional development training to the Egyptian market.

GCU delivers a highly successful MSc Environmental Management programme with 250 international students attending the programme in both London and Glasgow and has limited capacity to develop the programme within the UK, and is looking for TNE opportunities.  The university has support from the British Council (Saudi) to explore TNE offerings in Saudi.  The Egyptian HE market is growing significantly and GCU wishes to explore that market.

Nile University has previous grants that are related to course development and student exchange in Going Global Partnerships (GGP). The previous grants support research, knowledge, and innovation collaboration and create an enabling environment while supporting institutions and individuals to benefit from internationalization.

Outcome:

In the short term, the project will allow partners to focus on the development of high-quality training resources in the field of environment and sustainability, without having to address institutional policy issues around formal TNE offerings.  It will build and strengthen mutual areas of learning and research.

In the medium term, it will enable the partners to develop a financially sustainable model for accredited professional training courses within the Egyptian market.  It will also give the partners confidence in defining a TNE offering aligned to the environmental/sustainability/ carbon management market.

In the long term, it is planned that the three partners will establish a TNE offering in the Environmental Management area, contextualized and relevant to the MENA region.