THE IMPACT OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES ON THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS OF BORDERLESS HIGHER EDUCATION

This paper focuses on the impact of digital technologies and communication on the development and internationalization of higher education and highlights several recommendations for the Romanian higher education institutions in order to help them compete on the new emerging global educational market in the context of the knowledge society.
Information and communication technologies (ICT) have provided education not only with the means for crossing national borders and become an internationalized service, but also with the means for going over the limitations of classic education.
As defined by specialists, borderless education describes the changes that transcend the traditional boundaries of higher education, which might be geographical, conceptual or methodological.
This power of borderless education to incorporate the classic dimensions of instruction and to overpass its limitations has also brought about another change of paradigm in the field of higher education. Under the pressure of economic and social globalization of the world, education needs to change as to adapt to the needs of the society: to teach and train future “global citizens”.
Evolved from distance learning, the concepts of eLearning and blended learning combined with the latest ICT make the idea of borderless education more tangible than ever, along with the quick increase in the global competition among higher education institutions in the new paradigm of the knowledge society. Therefore, universities from many countries around the world began to attract international students through well-structured academic programs focused on the needs of a more and more dynamic labor market. This paper presents several successful cases such as CNED in France, the Open University in UK, the University of Phoenix in the USA, and several Australian universities who all succeeded in enrolling a great number of international students in their academic programs.
Although during the communist era the Romanian government used to advertise for the Romanian universities in the Asian, Arab and African countries in order to attract foreign students, it seems that nowadays governments forgot how beneficial those international programs were for the multi-cultural development of the academic communities and for the budgets of the universities. At the moment, the Romanian government has started to sketch a strategy for supporting the Romanian universities (public or private) to get on the international education market. Therefore, this paper offers several recommendations for the Romanian government and universities to support them in their efforts to access the highly competitive global higher education market where the key determinants seem to be quality, knowledge, entrepreneurship and internationalization.