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Higher education student and staff mobility project
Start date: Jun 1, 2014, End date: Sep 30, 2015 PROJECT  FINISHED 

The University of Ferrara has been part of the Erasmus Programme since 1990, that’s why European mobility of students and staff units has become a daily routine, a constant in our students’ academic life. Being part of Erasmus has been consolidating our trends of internationalization, which are to be considered the two main pillars of the university strategic policy, duly supported by the tools and the means now in force for any kind of mobility (Learning Agreement, ECTS grading system, credit recognition systems and so on), no matter the destination or the funding source. This engagement in Erasmus has also set out clear procedures to handle any phase of the mobility process (please see: http://www.unife.it/studenti/internazionale/erasmus/erasmus ) as well as clarifying all the positions of all the participants involved in the long process which enables the students to get recognized the credits earned abroad. Within this favorable context the University submits every year its own project about student and staff mobility in the framework of Erasmus+. The goals may differ from participant to participant. The students’ main goal is to study in a different country, go through different educational patterns, train their skills in a foreign language, deepen their understanding of a diverse culture and, finally, get the credits earned abroad recognized into their academic curriculum by the end of the process. The Professors spending a teaching experience abroad, instead, aim at creating and consolidating the relationships with foreign institutions. Staying at a foreign university, teaching, getting to know personally the colleagues, seizing the chance to have a word with the local students is often the starting point of new cooperations whose positive results will be affecting the students as well; however there’s still a critical issue connected to teaching staff mobility: the formal recognition and validation of the whole experience in the professional resumé. The admin staff operators usually go on mobility for training, the main goal is to broaden the knowledge and deepen the competences on a definite matter closely connected to their professional track. Vaguely neglected at the beginning, the international mobility experiences are now multiplying, especially those of the admin staff. The major objective which Unife aims at is to help reaching the goals of “Europe Strategy 2020” by giving off future workers with high qualifications and multidisciplinary skills, who may benefit from higher employment chances in the mainframe of the current job market. Another important goal Unife keeps pursuing is to encourage the international mobility of more and more students, and, at the same time, to welcome and host incoming students who may help building up an open and integrated academic environment where the difference stands for a resource. Moreover, incoming students act as a spur over teaching methods, and over the didactic offer, giving a contribution to the so-called “internationalization at home” whose benefits are directed to those student who don’t take part in any mobility experience. As for admin staff mobility, the University aims at improving the professional performance, managing to innovate the internal workflow, and deeply understanding the international activities and policies. The Erasmus+ programme involves all the students from 1st, 2nd and 3rd cycle as well as the University staff. The broadest participation is the one of 2nd cycle students, the less evident is the PhD students one, also for numerical reasons. The overall number of outgoing students duly registered is 268, which goes over the amount agreed in the financial agreement, whilst only 22 staff units have left compared with the 25 agreed; a fairly light decrease has been registered in teaching staff mobility. A growing interest has been registered around the possibility of traineeship, even though most of the students decide to leave for study reasons or to carry out thesis research. Thanks to the financial subsidy the University grants in accordance with the amount of credits earned on the mobility period, we’ve also registered an upsurge in the number of credits obtained abroad. The teaching staff mobility usually consists of seminaries, while the admin staff mobility usually consists of taking part in “staff training weeks” focusing on a specific admin topic. The main goals of the Project have been reached: increase of students’ mobility, increase of credits earned abroad. It seems evident that the relevant results such as a higher awareness of the common European identity and a higher acceptance of the new, a proficiency knowledge of a foreign language and the attitude to act in international contexts will be surely taking place in the long term and will not be only affecting the academic environment, but also the society where the students are supposed to work and live.
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