The organization of the learning environment concerns mainly the administration-
to-student and administration-to-learner interrelationships. Referring to incoming
foreign students as an example, the two core interactions (home-to-guest student
and guest student-to-lecturer) have to be organized in such way that the student’s
learning process is facilitated.
Sometimes quite simple changes in the administration of incoming students can
improve the learning environment. For instance a university could institutionalize
the student contacts by letting guest students share a dorm room with home-based
students or by creating a “buddy program” (mentoring program) with a range of
various activities between home and guest students during the semester. The quali-
ty of interaction among students could be enhanced by changes in the lecturer-to-
student interrelation. If students are embedded in collaborative teaching projects
(case studies, research papers etc.) during the semester the learning subject be-
comes the context of interactions. In classes with an international student audi-
ence, lectures with a higher degree of interaction and individual student contribu-
tion are more beneficial for the individual learning process than lectures with a low
degree of interactivity. Quite often the design of the learning environment in re-
gard to internationalization is an organizational issue. To reach the overall target,
an increase of the impact of internationalization on individual learning, an organi-
zationally tight link and continuous communication between the university’s inter-
national office and the faculty are necessary.
The audit of external contacts such as program partners or institutions comprises
the same tasks that should be done in the internal audit. For instance, foreign
partner universities have to be assessed in regard to the learning environment pro-
vided for incoming foreign students. Auditing of external partners does not imply
using a standardized set of criteria for the assessment. Probably foreign partners
use different learning methods and are quite successful. The learning process is a
purely individual process, and therefore the assessment of a learning environment
must also be individualized. For this type of assessment internal system infor-
mation is needed and can’t be obtained simply by sending out questionnaires to
foreign partners. The information has to be gained by personal interviews with
administrators, lecturers and students of foreign partners or by interviews with
returning home-based students or lecturers who visited partner universities for at
least a semester. This review process may lead to finding that some foreign part-
ners don’t provide a favorable learning environment for receiving outgoing do-
mestic students while some partners are much better than originally assessed. Fur-
thermore, these audit results focus on the learning environment and don’t take
18