Past Initiatives

International Students Support Group

As the globalisation of higher education advances, the number of students studying abroad increases, and this trend is in evidence at many of the IARU campuses.Many international students face acute challenges in making a successful transition to their new institution, including adjusting to a new society, a new academic culture, and (often) a new language of instruction.

The IARU universities offer services to the entire student body germane to international students, including induction programs, language instruction, academic resources such as mentoring programs or a writing centre, and welfare services. And international students often form vibrant student groups.

Scope

These services and groups can be very effective, but they may not be enough to help international students to thrive and reach their academic potential.

IARU believes, that

1. international students are substantially more likely to struggle in particular ways.
2. targeted support could make a meaningful difference in raising international student performance and creating more positive overall experiences, because international students at world-leading universities typically bring outstanding talent and drive.

IARU partners formed an institutional joint working group to share best practices on this topic and to work towards defining minimum and ideal standards for supporting international students.

Partnership with Futurity

Futurity is a non-profit online knowledge-sharing platform for research news from more than 60 universities. Hosted at the University of Rochester, USA, Futurity serves almost 8,000 subscribers, including news outlets, with a daily newsletter with science story ideas. The network has over 20,000 followers on Social Media. Futurity partners only with university alliances, among them AAU, Russell Group and Group of Eight. (numbers from 2014)

IARU has been associated with Futurity. Each IARU institution can engage with Futurity’s online platform for science news by entering a bilateral agreement with Futurity.

Best Practice in Leadership Development

Led by the University of Copenhagen, IARU HR directors and senior managers responsible for leadership development formed a network to discuss challenges and to share best practices concerning leadership development for leaders in academia. The network explored:

• Common leadership challenges facing IARU member universities in challenging and changing/turbulent times - both at an institutional level and at a research group level
• Current best practices within leadership development, e.g. use of leadership competency frameworks, program designs, delivery models etc.
• Future IARU initiative focusing on leadership development

The network has been successfully formed. Its members are in touch on a regular basis.

 


Integrated Services

Benchmarking HR and Corporate Services involve transactional services across corporate functions moving under one line management structure over a period of time, resulting in efficiency savings through process and system improvements, multi-skilling of staff and economies of scale in administrative activities.

A key result from this initiative was an extensive benchmarking report on the areas of HR and finance between five IARU institutions.

Open Access / Open Cast Publishing

30 librarians, researchers and industry representatives met in January 2010 to discuss the issue of Open Access / Open Cast Publishing. The motivation for the meeting arose from the need to discuss alternative ways of publishing (e.g. internet as a medium for content distribution) as well as creative solutions to address the increasingly rising costs for licenses in academic journals which in the long run will limit accessibility of the various academic journals by the university libraries.

Careers Professional Network

Through the universities' career centres, students could benefit from more information to equip them for careers that are becoming increasingly global. Similarly, employers could also be assisted in their graduate recruitment across the world through inter-agency referrals. A meeting of career development professionals of these universities was held to discuss areas of collaboration and to facilitate global career development and employment needs of students and employers. 

VP Research Meeting

Senior Research Heads of IARU universities met to discuss various issues related to the running of research-intensive universities. Topics discussed included:

• Frameworks for collaboration - common problems and solutions, mechanisms to facilitate collaborative research, general understanding of constraints in each country / region – such as contract jurisdictions, intellectual property laws
• Mechanisms to manage and direct research to achieve university strategic objectives
• Crisis management - the role of universities in assisting government to respond to crises - e.g. avian influenza, earthquakes / tsunamis, wars / civil unrest in neighbouring countries