Lemmens The Virtual Challenge to International Cooperation in Higher Education Bernd Wächter (ed.) Aca papers on International Cooperation in Education The V irtual Challenge to International Cooperation in Higher Education

Imagine Global U – European Union and international
initiatives as an incentive for international virtual education
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Imagine Global U
Every day, more than 40 million students step into one of the 2,500
Global University campuses in 117 countries around the world. In
Australia, the Global University sells one out of four degrees program-
mes. The corporation operates primarily as a franchiser, with about 80
percent of its campuses independently owned. The remainder are
educational companies, operated by Global University International.
Global U is ranked 126th in the Fortune 500, based on an official
annual revenue of $ 23 billion – although actual sales revenue, in-
cluding that generated by the franchised campuses, was around $ 39
billion in 2005.
Outside the US, Global U has close to half of the world’s branded
higher education and training market, and 63 percent of sales (High-
lights, 2003 Annual Report). The corporation opens four new learning
centres a day, 1,750 a year, most of them outside the US. In the past
decade, Global U has entered 64 new countries, with the US and
European businesses contributing most to operating income. In 2004,
new markets included Lebanon, Moldova, Nicaragua, Pakistan, the
Republic of Georgia and Norway. E-learning and e-commerce open
new opportunities for the company and CEO Jim Weinberg says that
there are market opportunities for the company on every desktop and
PDA around the world.
Global U’s s vision is to provide the best and most cost-effective
learning experience for any target group in any local market. Traditio-
nal state-funded universities are welcome as franchisees, but are not
allowed to sell competing programmes and degrees. All programmes
and educational services are quality assured by the Global Accredita-
tion Foundation (GAF), an independent body located in Washington,
Brussels, Sydney, Nairobi, Peking, Singapore and Rio.

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Introduction
I am pleased to have this opportunity to address people involved in the
management of internationalisation schemes, but I was somewhat hesitant
when asked to give this presentation, because I do not consider myself an
expert in the field of student mobility, nor an expert on virtual universities or
virtual education.
First, one has to ask a few basic questions. What is virtual mobility and vir-
tual education, where does it occur, who participates, how does it work, why
could international university collaboration benefit from it, and which instru-
ments are needed to realise the full potential of these virtual phenomena.
“Virtual” is one of the most often used buzzwords associated with the emerg-
ing information society, a vision introduced at the G-7 Summit in Naples in
July 1994. But the word virtual has not one single precise meaning. A search
by means of the extensive “FAST Search Engine” (www.alltheweb.com) on
some terms related to virtuality revealed the following number of documents
identified: “virtual education”: 1,767,804; “virtual university”: 1,679,148; “vir-
tual campus”: 346,104; “virtual mobility”: 65,965, “mobility in higher educa-
tion”: 96,515; “international cooperation in higher education”, 86,709.