(Apologies for this being posted a couple of days late)

This afternoon I took part in a 'signing ceremony' for an agreement on a new joint Masters programme to be delivered by Law and Politics here with Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.  It will be a Masters and will involve stduents studying in both institutions, It has taken a lot of work to put together, involving colleagues in LeTS as well as the small group of senior colleagues who oversee the governance relationships for all forms of collaboration.  Later a mixed group of Japanese and UK colleagues had a meal together in town to celebrate the achievement.  The first students will enrol next session.

When I first became PVC one of the early actions I supported was to create the possibility of Sheffield awarding joint degrees with other institutions - degrees where there would be one degree award made jointly by two universities (symbolically with two crests on the degree certificate).  Such degrees could be awarded where programmes had been jointly developed, jointly taught, jointly examined, and subject to a quality assurance process thatw as operated jointly.  Our new degree with Doshisha is not going to be a joint degree.  Sheffield has actually run ahead of the rest of the field in creating the opportunity to award these.  Many other unviersiteis around the world do not have such powers, often because their national funding bodies and governments insist that any final qualification has to be solely owned by one institution ('their' institution).  Even with the UK, a number of other universities can not yet award joint degrees.  They look to our example (as also has the Japanese government) to see what can be done.

Our new Doshisha degree is a double degree - students will receive two awards, one from each institution.  In principle such awards make me a little uneasy - one programme of work should lead to one qualification (although I know that there are long-standing exceptions even within our own unviersity in the form of, for example, the MBChB).   But the Doshisha degere is going to be a two year degree, and the double award in this case is more acceptable to UK eyes - given the normal one-year length of our Masters programmes.

The Doshisha degree is among a group of new programmes we are now delivering with institutions around the world - on an integrated basis.  UK universities for many years saw the rest of the world almost exclusively in terms of recruitment opportunities - often with a rather colonialist mentality that took it for granted that 'we' could deliver a higher standard of education than could be provided in 'their' countries.  Thatw as a point made strongly to me when I was part of a UUK delegation to Hong Kong a few years ago and the Education Minister there deconstructed traditional UK attitudes for us.  Rebecca Hughes, our new PVC International, has a magnetic wall map in her office with ball-bearings marking all the places where students are studying for Sheffield degrees.  She can now add a ballbearing for Kyoto (Doshisha) to that.  And I look forward to many mroe arrangements that take advantage of the strengths of Sheffield as well as another institution to create innovative programmes that will give students experience of a much wider world.