Internationalization Strategy

Royal Thimphu College in Bhutan (www.rtc.bt) is a private undergraduate college with Bachelor's degree programmes affiliated to the national public university, the Royal University of Bhutan. RTC is in fact it is the first private college in Bhutan, open since 2009. In 2016, it became the first independently accredited tertiary educational institute in the country, achieving the Bhutan Accreditation Council's highest, A+, rating. Study areas include Bachelor of Arts programmes in Sociology & Political Science, Economics, English, Dzongkha (the national language), History, Anthropology, and Mass Communication, as well as a Bachelor of Science programme in Environmental Management and a BSc in Nursing and Midwifery. Also, about 40% of the college's 1250 students are in business programmes (Bachelor of Business Administration and Bachelor of Commerce). Our primary mission is to provide a college education that can push the standard traditional model of education slowly towards more modern/innovative approaches focusing on the holistic/skills-based development of our students.

Since Royal Thimphu College's very early days, we have felt that having good international exposure is important for us and our primarily Bhutanese students. Having a range of international faculty members is part of the College's internationalization strategy, and there are currently about 80 faculty members from about 9 countries on campus. International student peers on campus are another important aspect of our strategy. Therefore, we became the first full scale study-abroad option in Bhutan for students from other countries in 2010. Since then we have had over 500 students from USA & Canada, several European countries, Japan, Tanzania, Thailand, among others, in both semester-study abroad and short-term programmes. The College has since initiated bidirectional exchanges with several partners. The experience gained with such bidirectional mobility of both students and staff will be an asset for future mobility proposals.

The College has recently become involved in EU projects such as Erasmus+ and will be interested to strengthen its capacity to engage with European partners. All aforementioned academic departments are participating. RTC seeks new Key Action 1 mobility proposals on a bidirectional basis -- incoming and outgoing, and involving both students and staff. In the initial year, it is anticipated that teaching staff (for teaching and training) exchanges and non-teaching staff training exchanges would occur (durations of 1-2 weeks), in order to strengthen the partnership. In parallel or in subsequent years, student exchanges could also be possible in both directions (durations between 5-10 months), for international credit mobility. In the future years, the credit mobility exchanges could increase in number, and the partners could have sufficient confidence to work together for larger capacity-building projects. RTC is an agile institution, able to quickly provide due attention in exploring new directions.

There have thus far been limited mobilities for Bhutanese students and staff to engage in their academic subjects outside of Bhutan. The ICM programme opens the possibility for these individuals to learn from a broader range of perspectives and in vastly different academic and cultural environments. The participants will therefore learn from a much more diverse perspective than they could here in Bhutan. RTC benefits greatly both from the partner country students and staff’s presence on our campus interacting with our faculty members and students, and also from our own returning staff and students that bring rich intercultural academic perspectives back with them.