The Internationalisation Report submitted to the Governing Council shows that the academic year 2022-23 had the highest number of students and incoming mobility staff of the last five years

Research and education at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili is becoming more and more international. Of particular note in the last five years is the increase in terms of the URV’s overall scientific output indexed in Web of Science and Scopus and in the proportion of publications resulting from international collaborations. According to the Internationalisation Report presented today to the Governing Council, in 2023, 54% of publications were the result of collaborations with institutions from 99 countries. Of particular importance in terms of volume are the publications resulting from collaborations with institutions from European Union countries (mainly France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal); from Asia (China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia); the whole of the United States and Canada, and of the rest of the world. The United Kingdom, Brazil and Australia are the countries with which the URV publishes the most.

Also worthy of mention is the increase in the proportion of research staff employed by the URV from other countries – from 27% in 2019 to the current 43% – and almost five out of ten pre-doctoral trainee researchers are from other countries, a proportion that has remained stable in recent years.

As far as courses are concerned, the URV’s master’s and doctoral programmes are attractive to international audiences, as 30% of master’s students and 47% of doctoral students are from outside Spain. Twenty of the 58 university master’s degrees are taught mostly in English, and three have Erasmus Mundus recognition from the European Union.

Presented by the Commissioner for International Networks Joan Miquel Canals, the 2023 Internationalisation Report shows that the academic year 2022-23 had the highest number of students and incoming mobility staff (from other universities) of the last five years. In fact, for the first time in this five-year period, the number of students on mobility visits at the URV is the same as the number of URV students visiting universities (469 and 467, respectively).

Of the members of the URV’s teaching and research staff and the administration and service staff, 46 have been on mobility visits, while 69 staff members from other universities have visited the URV, many of them on the short-term intensive hybrid program offered in conjunction with the Aurora Alliance. This Alliance also contributes 10% of student mobility and in 2023 was awarded the funding that ensures its immediate future.

The internationalisation of the University has also been extended within the institution with programmes such as COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning), which focuses on student learning, international experience and team work so that students can develop their global skills without leaving home. In 2023, 344 students from the URV and 235 from partner universities took part in eleven subjects with ten university lecturers.

The URV also has 29 ongoing mobility and cooperation projects worth 8.7 million euros to improve the quality of teaching and learning. They are designed for students and university staff and encourage joint initiatives in the field of higher education that share, transfer and implement innovative practices on an international scale.