The Comparative Study Of Internationalizing The Curriculum In Higher Education Of The United States Australia Canada And The UK

Under the background of economic globalization, improving students’ abilities of multicultural and global understanding has become one of the important goals of higher education. Therefore, developed countries actively promote internationalization of higher education, and internationalization of curriculum as important content of the internationalization of higher education is paid unprecedented attention. This paper builds the dimension of comparison to analyze the internationalization of curriculum of United States, Australia, Canada and the UK in three respects:motivations, paths and participants.This paper includes six parts as follows:The first part introduces the research background and proposes the research framework on the basis of literature review. This paper tries to study from three dimensions:motivations, paths and participants of internationalization of curriculum in higher education.The second part discusses the theoretical basis of this study and defines the concepts of the internationalization of higher education and internationalization of curriculum in higher education.The third part analyzes the motivations from four dimensions, including national level, college level, level of the teacher and students’ level. Through the comparative analysis concluded that common motivations of internationalization of curriculum mainly comes from the economic, academic and the labor market and the needs of the students and teachers; in national and college level, the motivations are significantly different.The forth part compares the similarities and differences paths of internationalization of curriculum from the curriculum target, curriculum setting, curriculum implementation and curriculum evaluation. Through the comparative analysis concluded that the four countries have their own characteristics in internationalization of curriculum’s path, especially in the curriculum setting, the four countries all have found the correct roads that are suitable for themselves.The fifth part analyzes the participants in internationalization of curriculum. In addition to the traditional participators like country, colleges, teachers and students, there are some new participators such as Education group (company), media (or publishing) companies, overseas campuses, online colleges and professional organization, etc. The emergence of these groups showed that cross-border course is becoming a new pattern of the internationalizing the curriculum and playing an increasingly important role.The sixth part explores the enlightenments of developed countries to our country after comparing the internationalization of curriculum of the United States, Australia, Canada and the UK. In the process of internationalization of curriculum, our country needs to learn the experience of developed countries, but we cannot completely copy their ways. We should combine China’s national conditions and reflects Chinese characteristics. Specifically speaking, we should stick to their cultural identity, reform the curriculum design, improve the curriculum evaluation, perfect credit swaps, prevent brain drain and avoid curriculum homogeneity. This paper hopes to make more scholars paid attention to this issue and find a new path suitable for China’s internationalization of curriculum.