TOWARDS STRATEGIC INTERNATIONALISATION AND GLOBAL PROMINENCE: MODELLING CONTINUOUS QUALITY IMPROVEMENT FOR SUSTAINABLE INTERNATIONALISATION OF THE MALAYSIAN TECHNICAL UNIVERSITIES

Internationalisation is a critical success factor in strategic planning of a world-class university. In the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), Malaysia still does not have a representative in the world’s top 100 universities among its technical universities. This may arguably change with proper planning and implementation of continuous quality improvement (CQI) of the internationalisation strategies adopted by these technical universities. In addition, it will help to determine their standing on the international trajectory as perceived by the international students at the Malaysian technical universities. Hence, it is proposed that CQI of the internationalisation strategies by the Malaysian technical universities should consider transforming the international students’ experiences into meaningful interpretations in terms of what constitutes quality global education from the perspective of their international students. This paper proposes the modelling of CQI for sustainable internationalisation of the Malaysian technical universities based on meaningful interpretations of four quadrants for CQI purposes: flourishing (high importance-high performance), dissatisfying (high importance-low performance), nurturing (low importance high performance), and stagnating (low importance-low performance). It is anticipated that this CQI model of sustainable internationalisation will facilitate the top management, policy makers and administrators of the Malaysian technical universities to continuously plan and implement their internationalisation agenda more effectively and consequently become more internationalised and achieve global prominence strategically in engineering and technology higher education.