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Higher education student and staff mobility projec..
Higher education student and staff mobility project
Start date: Jun 1, 2014,
End date: May 31, 2016
PROJECT
FINISHED
DK is a leading cultural and educational institution rooted in the Danish cultural her-itage with a special commitment to the issues of sustainability, social inclusion, cultural diversity, and to creating responsible economic growth. The international strategy says: “DK wants to inspire, challenge and develop Dan-ish design and the role, relevance and reach of the designer in a global world, and function as a progressive and creative knowledge- and innovation capacity with lo-cal roots and international format”. Danish design and designers have an international reputation and bear a significant importance for Danish export.
Training professional designers means preparing students for a globally oriented profession with high focus on practical experience and business network. With globalization, global market, long distance production, multicultural societies, the designer’s workplace has expanded and it is no longer enough to be able to react to your local market. Therefore, it is essential for the school to give our students an education preparing them for global action and providing them with intercultural competences.
For these reasons internationalization is a strong part of the general objectives of the school. Our main international goal is to become one of the top 60 design institutions in the world within the next few years. In order to achieve that we have set up some actions that we focus on. E.g. focus on international communication, strengthening the English website, welcome more international Master students, international fo-cus in student semester agreements, participation in international events and exhi-bitions, holding an annually international design camp, having outposts in Shanghai and Ghana where we hold joint courses with our partner institutions, in-ternational Ph.D. seminars etc.Designskolen Kolding divides its international work into four different levels:
Overseas where we focus on institutional collaboration in China and Brazil.
European where we focus on student and teacher exchange. In Europe the research is strong so we have special partnerships with e.g. Politecnico di Milano, London College of Fashion and University of Borås.
Scandinavian where we are part of a Nordplus network called Cirrus where we focus on student (both one semester exchange and Express Mobility) and teacher exchange and joint projects.
Co-operation within Denmark with international companies. E.g. we have several EU financed projects where we combine companies, students, teachers, research-ers and NGOs to solve a specific topic.
The EU cooperation is of special importance for DK due to the design tradition being very strong here. Most of our students go on exchange in Europe.
The objectives and priorities for the EU cooperation are:
The exchange of students and staff. The co-operation within the school network and participation in development of new networks within education, research, business and benchmarking. Network based collaborations with selected companies, containing both internships and research. Securing the evaluation and qualification of our education and student services.
DK does not participate in double/multiple/joint degrees at the moment but collab-orate with other institutions on project and research level. The reason is that we are consolidating our Master education over the next years. When so done, we might look into this area.
Student exchange and internship are integrated in our curriculum. The school has made a career center which gives advises to the students concerning internships and external collaboration. They follow the students through interviews before, during and after the internships in order to make the internships as professional as possible. Furthermore, the students have to collaborate with an external partner during their graduation project. It can be a company, a municipality or an NGO.