There are many studies on internationalizing the curriculum, presenting different arguments and practices. One common thread in studies is to quote the typology suggested by Bremer and van der Wende (1995). However, such studies do not take the next step of checking what department heads think even though they play a key role in internationalizing the curriculum in their disciplines. The nature of the discipline causes different views about internationalized curricula. However, there are no explicit studies in the literature to describe the features of internationalized curricula for different disciplines. This paper presents the results and analysis of an online survey of department heads regarding the features of internationalized curricula they may consider to be essential, whether these views differ due to background variables, and similarities or differences in the importance of the features in 16 disciplines. The study, funded by the National Science Council, was conducted in the summer of 2007 and received 436 questionnaires for a 21.7% rate of return. The results show that over half of the respondents thought that only 8 out of 19 features of internationalized curricula were essential. The results indicate that respondents’ views differed significantly by background variables on certain features of internationalized curricula. The portrait of the importance of the features of internationalized curricula across 16 disciplines creates an interesting result. Finally, the results of the study that extends the literature are discussed in the end of the paper.

Keywords: internationalizing the curriculum, department head, discipline, Taiwan