Internationalization mechanisms in world selected universities and Iran

Internationalization of higher education is one of the raised and significant issues in most countries of the world, as well as Iran. The purpose of this study was to identify internationalization mechanisms in world selected universities and prioritization of mechanism in Iranian universities. An applied and mixed method was chosen for this study. In the first step, using information and documents available on official sites, the activities of the selected universities including Princeton University, University of Toronto, ETH Zurich, Oxford University, University of Singapore, and University of Melbourne were studied. In the second step, using Analytic Hierarchical Process and Expert Choice software, the mechanisms of internationalization of higher education in Iran were prioritized. By combining weights, the seven internationalization mechanisms of higher education were prioritized by six criteria. Based on the AHP results, university development criterion with a relative weight of .284, had superior priority to other criteria. Among the alternatives, holding joint bachelor and postgraduate programs had the most proiority (weight= .235). Afterward, there were the short-term and long-term international faculty members and students exchanges (weight= .175) and conducting joint research projects (weight= .162).