Over the past years, the number of international students in Higher Education has grown significantly. The Bologna Process has played an important role in this internationalisation of European universities, following its aim to further standardise Higher Education across Europe. Furthermore, universities in Europe actively promote the ERASMUS+ exchange programme. Due to the growing number of international students, classrooms previously composed of (mostly) national students have become international classrooms containing students from multiple cultural backgrounds who use a single language (often English) as the lingua franca.

In a time in which politicians in The Netherlands, the UK and elsewhere are increasingly critical towards the internationalisation of higher education, the question remains to what extent students benefit from the international classroom. There is a lack of recent literature that looks at the European context. Furthermore, existing literature does not provide a unified conclusion. Some studies are critical about international classrooms, and argue that a diversified environment often is constrained by language barriers, which hamper academic performance. Other studies suggest that international students are more likely to struggle with mental health due to being less involved in student activities. But there is also literature that stresses benefits of international classrooms regardless of nationality. These benefits include higher grades, better cognitive development, better problem-solving skills and better job prospects after graduation.

We contribute to these academic and political debates through an analysis of students’ performance in and experience with the international classroom. Most studies on the international classroom have focused on the US and Australia. Hence, providing a European perspective to the literature is important, given that the number of international students continues to increase, but without strong evidence of the positive effects of studying in another European country.

Our study is set in the problem-based learning environment which offers a suitable context to study the international classroom. For studying the interaction between students in such an active learning environment has a number of advantages, including the use of small groups, high rates of student interaction, and the availability of relevant data on group composition.

Preliminary results from the quantitative part of our study demonstrate that students’ academic performances are positively affected by the international classroom if there are three to four different nationalities in the group. The qualitative part of our study reveals that the international classroom works well as students and tutors are motivated to work with students with different nationalities.

The European Commission declared 2023 as the European Year of Skills and aims to make the European Educational Area a reality by 2025. In recent years, the EU has adopted several key initiatives(The Digital Education Action Plan or the Communication from the Commission on a renewed higher education agenda) to support and guide the member states in building digital learning environments. Although there is rich literature on integrating Web 2.0 instruments in the research process, the digitalisation of the teaching and learning process has received less attention. As such, this paper aims to fill this gap and investigates the issue of the digitalisation of higher education institutions in Central and Eastern Europe. It explores the digitalisation process as a top-down and bottom-up process. It employs the approach developed by Cathrine Edelhard Tømte et al., 2019) and aims to map the state of play of the digitalisation process by analysing the strategies, policies and measures meant to reinforce digital teaching and learning.