International Professors Project (IPP)

IPP is an interconnected web of academics, post-doctorates, independent scholars, and graduate students. The project's growing membership and both internet-driven and informal networks provide global information, ideas, and knowledge channels - using both information and communication technologies (ICTs) and face-to-face interactions to share ideas, information, and knowledge of country and regional variations in teaching, learning, research, and living.

Specifically, IPP's "International Professors" are the Project's academics in the field. They travel to developing-world universities, where they both teach and develop curricula at their chosen universities. They mentor about-to-be and fledgling professors at the local level, to help develop a well-trained corps of "International Instructors". The latter young professionals are assigned to universities in their homelands. The Faculty Support Project has been established to augment what a receiving university can afford (done on a case-by-case evaluation). Also, this support is extended for teachers in developing countries so that they can afford to stay in their own country – to reduce what might otherwise become a so-called ‘brain-drain’.

IPP is working to build a platform on its website to create a database to assist teaching careers and encourage collegiality between and among expatriate and local professors. As the organisation grows, IPP will regularly collect and disseminate relevant data, thereby furthering the academic study of cross-cultural university-level teaching - to be shared on this website. In addition, IPP Fellows will supervise and study their paedagogical experience from within their own fields of expertise in order to develop the full potential of this career. Fellows and Professors will work towards internationalising higher education teaching methods, curriculum design, and mentoring throughout the developing world, sharing and disseminating data and completed research across the developing and developed world over the internet. For example, IPP Founder and International Professor Ron Krate has sent thousands of new research papers from around the globe to administrators and professors at Hanoi University of Foreign Studies and Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. He has organised volunteers to send scholarly papers to the Institute of History, Hanoi, and is collaborating with officials of the African Association of Universities to arrange to send academic and professional papers mined from various search engines to African universities.

Education.

According to organisers, the greatest obstacles to providing high-quality university education in developing countries are related to funding, curriculum, and retention. Yet, IPP stresses that an educated population is a key factor in leading a country out of poverty and into economic productivity. IPP explains that "one size does not fit all" when it comes to higher education for developing worlds. Much of western policy, science, and technology offers little discourse and instruction on the majority of the world's environmental, population, and security issues/needs. Furthermore, many educated citizens of the developing world choose to pursue higher education and their careers the in developed world; IPP indicates that their absence is often to the detriment of their home nations, which would benefit from their expertise and experience.