Blended Academic International Mobility Erasmus Project

Project Title

Blended Academic International Mobility

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Overcoming skills mismatches (basic/transversal); New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning

Project Summary

Higher education institutions aim to prepare students to succeed in the labor market. Professional life requires professionals to excel in collaborative and communication skills at an international, cross-cultural environment. Thus, international exposure during studies, having a significant impact on personal and inter-personal development of students, plays a key role in promoting students employability.

Innovative teaching paradigms are required in order to develop soft skills and facilitate international contact to higher education students within the available timespan and resources without demanding for costly curricula revisions. Blended mobility overcomes typical barriers to mobility thus allowing students to take advantage of the benefits of mobility and international exposure despite these barriers. However, blended mobility is hardly used and barely recognized as a serious alternative with great potential to overcome the common barriers to international mobility.

Blended-AIM raises awareness to the added value of blended mobility with regards to its potential to overcome barriers to international mobility and provides the information and the tools to facilitate its implementation in HEI and companies.

Blended-AIM aims to the sustainable promotion of students’ employability by means of blended mobility.
The specific objectives of Blended-AIM are grouped in structural and pedagogical objectives.
Structural objectives:
• Settle the European foundation for blended mobility
• Foster internationalization of education
• Deploy, test and disseminate a blended mobility project course unit combining best practices
Pedagogical objectives:
• Promote students’ employability through non-formal learning not requiring curricula changes
• Promote international experience of undergraduate students
• Boost the provision of professional skills, support collaborative learning and critical thinking

The partnership that implemented Blended-AIM and continues developing blended mobility in higher education is growing since 2015 when the project started. The original consortium includes 10 full partners, including 8 HEI, one association operating in the field of Geographical Information Systems, grouping organizations from more than 20 European countries, and the European Association of Erasmus Coordinators, a reputable partner in the European Higher Education Area, with nearly 200 associates.
During the last 3 years, the Blended-AIM concept attracted several stakeholders in Europe and abroad. We have enlarged the partnership with four companies, coming from Germany, Italy and Belgium and three universities, coming from Portugal, Slovenia and Iraq.

The core activities of Blended-AIM are related to the three pilot course editions that were held in the academic years between 2015/16 and 2017/18 (IO4 to IO6). These pilot editions provided inputs to improve the initial drafts of the blended mobility student kit (IO1) and a course guide (IO3) specifying a set of rules and guidelines for the implementation of project course units following the Blended-AIM paradigm. Another key activity with regards to raising awareness to blended mobility was the development of a Wikipedia entry on blended mobility in the partners’ languages (IO7). All these, built on top of a preliminary analysis of the current state of the art of blended mobility in Europe (IO2).
Each pilot course edition includes two training sessions were the students are introduced to multicultural teamwork, work organization, online groupware tools, agile methodologies for system development and pitching ideas.
A significant number of dissemination activities were promoted by all partners.

As a direct consequence of the dissemination efforts taken during the project, in the last edition of the pilot course funded by the project we had more offers from companies than those we could cope with. There are several companies supporting the continuation of the Blended-AIM course. We are running the 2018/19 edition with 18 students and two companies that we had to select from nearly 10 offers.
Also the universities are interested in the continuation of this course unit at their own expenses. In the 2018/19 course edition we have 19 students from 8 universities organized in two teams to develop two solutions for two companies. This is the most significant and rewarding impact we have achieved. The Blended-AIM proved to be a valuable approach for all direct stakeholders (students, companies, universities) and the sustainability is assured due to its intrinsic added value.

Companies see Blended-AIM as an innovative, effective and valuable approach, particularly in developing and testing proof of concept. We are driving Blended-AIM to be recognized in the long term as an option to develop proof of concept, mainly for SME; a way for SME to have access to R&D through the cooperation with a multidisciplinary team of higher education students and their supervisors.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 374806,88 Eur

Project Coordinator

INSTITUTO POLITECNICO DO PORTO & Country: PT

Project Partners

• Odisee vzw
• GISIG GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL GROUP ASSOCIAZIONE
• UNIVERSITAET SIEGEN
• UNIVERSITAET PADERBORN
• FH JOANNEUM GESELLSCHAFT MBH
• THE GLASGOW CALEDONIAN UNIVERSITY
• TECHNOLOGICAL EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTE OF CRETE