Managing International Student Collaborations

Knowledge and experience from working in international collaborative projects prepares engineering students for their future careers in a global market. Hence this is an important element in higher education, although seldom provided in the curriculum. One reason for this lack might be uncertainty in how to manage international collaborations and to create a good learning environment for the development of skills related to international collaborations. Therefore this article describes our experiences from managing international student collaborations including theoretical underpinning for our choices when relevant. Having given the context of, and the strategies for running our two collaborations, we provide an analysis of our experiences. This includes observations of differences in the two collaborations, both when due to use of different strategies and when due to different contexts, as well as observations of similarities. With this in mind, we present recommendations for running international student collaborations.