Student Mobility Procedures Manual Development Strategy for International Offices in Universities

Abstract

Background: Policies reflect the rules guiding the implementation of the organizational process. Procedures, on the other hand, represent an implementation of policy and need to be responsive to the changing work environment over time as new tools emerge, new processes are designed, and the risks associated with an area change in response to internal or external environmental changes. This paper aimed to come up with a strategy for developing a student mobility procedures manual for an international office in a university. Materials and Methods: In this paper content analysis was used to analyze the activities carried out in the life cycle of student mobility from recruitment and selection to credits transfer and post mobility evaluation. Results: The categorized student mobility activities into four broad categories of recruitment and selection; pre-travel; arrival, stay, and departure; and after mobility. The paper suggested a student mobility procedures manual development approach that uses five work packages of international office staff capacity building; procedures manual development; operationalization; quality control and monitoring; and dissemination. Conclusion: The ultimate goal for a procedure document is for the design to be simple, consistent, and easy to use. To ensure a consistent format between documents, the university needs to develop a manual template to help the writers of the procedures get started. The guidelines in this paper can be very useful in structuring and compiling the manual content. The paper emphasizes stakeholder engagement in the entire lifecycle of the procedures manual.