Internationalization through Web Based Learning? An Assessment of the Virtualization of German Universities

The Paper broaches the issue of analyzing a potential relation between the emphasis on virtual web-based processes in an institution of higher education and the paradigm of internationalization. I do so by comparing three German universities, a campus-based university, a mostly paper-based distance-learning university and a fully virtual distancelearning university in terms of their services and procedures. Then I analyze each organizational system's capabilities to fulfill the paradigm of internationalization efficiently according to its four rationales: sociocultural, educational, political and economic. The data for my research was acquired from official documents provided by the universities and additional personal requests via e-mail. My findings are, that the campus-based university has advantages for the sociocultural and political rationales of internationalization due to the emphasis on face-to-face communication and on-campus services, while the virtual university succeeds for the educational and economical rationales of internationalization because of the more wide-spread influence of web services and timeless availability of content. Considering the high costs that the campus-based university’s services cause to the university, the thesis that web-based university structures support the paradigm of internationalization more efficiently can be accepted for these two rationales.