Transnational education licensing

Transnational education (TNE) licensing provides an efficient way of licensing resources to your students overseas, reducing duplication of effort and minimising the time spent negotiating with publishers for offshore users of content.

The constant changes in the digital world can have a huge impact on higher and further education services - now, more than ever, it is crucial to consider your institution’s global strategy.

Transnational education licensing is useful for higher education institutions that:

Need support in the provision of an equitable student experience
Have strategic plans to become players in the global education market

It is guided by a TNE licensing advisory board (docx) of university library staff and sector agency representatives from across UK higher education.

Benefits to your organisation

Transnational education licensing can:

Bring efficiencies, transparency and consistency of terminologies to the sector through a single licensing approach (pdf)
Represent an insurance policy for libraries providing licensed content to students as part of partnership agreements
Be a source of fast track ad-hoc expert advice and guidance
Provide iterative TNE Consortium negotiation with publishers
License content through agreements with publishers which address HE sector’s TNE requirements
Provide a decision tool and fast track support to understand local scenarios and outcomes
Offer an audit of your current local offshore scenarios identifying areas of concern
Enable easy access to HESA aggregate offshore record data
Provide access to confidential benchmarking data
Let you remain anonymous in publisher engagement

"For us, the benefit is organisational as well as financial. There’s the participation in the service, time and investment in identifying the savings, the savings themselves and the expansion of resources – huge benefits which support TNE activity for our China and Malaysia students and campuses."

Paul Cavanagh, senior librarian, resource acquisitions, University of Nottingham

Licensing approach

Jisc Collections agreements

For those wishing to provide offshore students with access to content licensed by Jisc Collections, we have produced guidance on how we are licensing for TNE access rights (pdf).

Delivering remote access to Jisc licensed content

We have developed guidance in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to support libraries on providing remote access to Jisc licensed content to students outside of the UK (pdf).

TNE licensing audit

As part of our transnational education licensing service, you can request an audit.

Through detailed benchmarking against the HESA Aggregate Offshore Record (AOR) data, we compare and analyse your transnational education scenario provisions and local situation in consideration of licensing content and provide you with advice and guidance.

The TNE licensing audit helps librarians and partnership offices understand the implications of working with different types of partners regarding provision of content to different student cohorts at campuses and partner locations abroad and to understand their particular profile and cost implications. It provides a useful report to build a business case for developing TNE partnerships and creating a mechanism for dialogue between partnership offices, libraries, finance and IT departments.

Our audit has developed from working with several librarians who needed some expert advice and guidance in order to gain a level of understanding and knowledge to engage with colleagues working in this space in universities and participate in the discussions.

Key features

Initial information gathering to understand your organisation’s TNE requirements or plans and identifying gaps
Establishing your current TNE activity profile and relevant provision scenarios by using the HESA AOR data reported by the institution
Contextualising your profile with reference to:
- Overall reported population
- Overall service subscribing population
- Comparable ‘provision scenarios’
- Relative scale against UK FTE
- Unusual size
- Risky countries/territories
- Content requirements
- Licensing terms and conditions
- Cost of content delivery
- Authentication
A briefing report of the summary findings of the audit