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Higher education student and staff mobility projec..
Higher education student and staff mobility project
Start date: Jul 1, 2014,
End date: Oct 31, 2015
PROJECT
FINISHED
The Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal (IPS) aims to be recognize national and internationally as a high quality institution on the higher education system.
This means that internationalization of its activities is very important as it is a way of being exposed to new challenges, charring experiences, benefiting from benchmarking and getting better every day. Furthermore according to the literature, internationalization of the curricula of our programs and, not less important, doing a mobility period is of particular relevance in the employability of the graduates from the higher education institutions in Europe.
That’s why the objectives of this project are:
Increase the possibilities of IPS students to have a mobility during their course;
Promote the possibility of IPS graduates to have a traineeship abroad;
Allow IPS Staff to have a training experience in another institution and learn from other experiences;
Share teaching practices and learn with other teachers and institution;
Increase and strength academic research ties.
During this project we had the opportunity to send 42 students to our Partner Institutions. Out of these 5 were recent graduates.
Regarding Staff mobility for training and for teaching we have sent 47 members although we had to use 36% of the amount of OS and additionally we had to use our one financial resources to allow it. So, there were 12 zero EU Grants that were totally supported by IPS, in the amount of 7757, 64 €.
Regarding gender of the participants we could observe that 62% of the students doing mobility were female and among staff we observed the same trend with 77%.
To prepare this mobility periods we have implemented different strategies to stimulate participants to submit their application, namely collecting students’ testimonies regarding their mobility experiences and organizing sessions to disseminate experiences.
Besides all the mandatory activities to prepare, execute, monitoring and improve the mobility periods, we want to emphasise the Preparatory Sessions for the outgoing students and the Welcome Sessions for the incoming students, during which the topics of Security and Multicultural Environments have great relevance.
The results of this project can be measured by the number of mobility achieve, as stated in the following table:
Total participants: 89
Student mobility for traineeships: 16
Student mobility for studies: 26
Staff mobility for teaching: 25
Staff mobility for training: 22
Regarding the student mobility the process of Recognition of Learning Outcomes was as following:
Student mobility for traineeships:
Average duration of the mobility in months - Duration (full months) – 2; Duration (extra days) – 16; Average number of recognised ECTS - 17.5
Student mobility for studies
Average duration of the mobility in months - Duration (full months) – 3; Duration (extra days) – 26.12; Average number of recognised ECTS – 19.04
The impact of this project on those who could do a mobility period was relevant. For instance, according to the opinion of the students their stay abroad allowed them to learn better how to cooperate in teams (91%), find solutions in difficult or challenging contexts (98%), plan and carry out their learning independently (90%), plan and organise tasks and activities (86%), see the value of different cultures (100%) or think logically and draw conclusions (90%).
Also according to the student’ opinion after having taken part in the mobility activity they are more able to adapt to and act in new situations (94%), to cooperate with people from other backgrounds and cultures (95%), to reach decisions (89%), to think and analyse information critically (87%). Also they are more confident and convinced of their abilities (96%) more interested in European topics (82%), more open-minded and curious about new challenges (97%), tolerant towards other persons' values and behaviour (89%), they have increased their sector- or field-specific skills (86%) and know better their strengths and weaknesses (96%).
Regarding the opinion of the academic staff that experience a mobility for teaching they considered that they have experimented and developed new learning practices or teaching methods (75%), increased their job satisfaction (92%), reinforced or extended their professional network or built up new contacts (100%) and reinforced the cooperation with the partner institution/organisation (96%), while those that have done a period considered that they have enhanced their organisational/management/leadership skills (77%), gained sector-specific or practical skills relevant for their current job and professional development (86%), improved their foreign language skills (82%), job satisfaction (91%), and social, linguistic and/or cultural competences (91%), learned from good practices abroad (91%), reinforced or extended their professional network or built up new contacts (100%) and reinforced the cooperation with the partner institution/organisation (92%).