Last week I helped organise the UC&R Northern Group meeting focused on support for international students. Karen, Marie and I presented our work on the SCONUL Guidelines again and I’ll link to our slides below.

However, the interesting part of the day for me was hearing the views of international students and scholars themselves. We invited two scholars to talk to us – Jarka Glassey is a senior lecturer at Newcastle now and she talked about her experiences learning in Slovakia and the issues she encountered coming to the UK. She made me aware that as well as planning support for new students, we must remember that we have many international scholars at all levels in our universities and must ensure that we cater for their experiences too.

Ramesh is a postgraduate student from Iran and she gave us her perceptions of the differences in learning and libraries in the countries she has studied in, the UK, Sweden and Iran, with some useful summaries on her slides.

Pat Gannon-Leary and Rosie Crane from Northumbria summarised their research findings on international learning cultures, highlighting issues in learning experiences which we need to be aware of when planning to teach international students.

We ran out of time for a proper discussion at the end of the day, but I am hoping we shall continue an online forum, as there were lots of interesting points to follow up.

Links to all the presentations are below: