The well-documented growth of international student mobility has been paralleled by the emergence of so-called "transnational education" (TNE), in which universities deliver their educational services to foreign students in their own countries, rather than the students travelling to the foreign university to study. While universities have engaged in limited TNE for decades (notably correspondence-based distance learning courses), transnational activity has expanded significantly over the last 20 years since the advent of the internet and the emergence of partnership-based models in which a third party delivers a franchised or validated programme. In this paper, we investigate the increasing complexity and multidimensionality of TNE partnerships, developing a new three-spectrum framework for conceptualising this activity. We argue that this new framework provides a more tractable way of understanding and analysing the "new internationalisation" of higher education.