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Monitoring Internationalisation of Czech Higher Education (MICHE) in 2020

In 2020, the Advisory Board of four international experts, including Irina Ferencz from ACA, monitored three Czech public HEIs - Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, University of West Bohemia, and Technical University of Liberec. As in the previous two years, the chosen institutions firstly evaluated the state of internationalisation by themselves via a detailed self-evaluation survey. Afterward the Advisory Board visited institutions to facilitate structured interviews with stakeholders at all the levels of the universities, from rector to vice-rectors, deans and vice-deans, representatives of IRO, and, of course, students and academic staff. These two-day site visits took place in October and November. Subsequently, each monitored university has received the final evaluation report with recommendations.  

For the very first time, the Advisory Board also re-visited the three HEIs which took part in MICHE in 2018. These one-day MICHE follow-up visits took part at the end of September 2020. The aim of the visits was to observe planned changes leading to improvement stated in their action plans from the previous year. Because of the pandemic, some of the visits had to take part in hybrid mode (some experts and representatives of DZS in person and some experts taking part online), later visits had to be held already in completely virtual environment. The extra work and effort everyone put in preparing the visits helped ensure that this change did not affect the outcome of the visits and everything went as smoothly as possible. 

Moreover, six HEIs that took part in MICHE 2019 planned to produce Action Plans on how to improve the current state of internationalisation within their institutions. The proposed Action Plans are then commented by the Advisory Board and will be approved by the Academic Senate afterwards. Last but not least, the Advisory Board also prepared a comprehensive national report reflecting general findings from MICHE from 2018 to 2020. 

Read more about the MICHE project here.