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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: Sep 30, 2015
PROJECT
FINISHED
Politecnico di Bari is a technical university with about 10,000 students, and about 600 permanent staff members, including teachers and non-teachers. It offers courses in Engineering and Architecture, in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd cycle. The international mobility of learners and staff, as well as the international cooperation, is not only a part of its mission, but is above all a strategic objective for the modernization and improvement of all its activities (teaching, research, technology transfer, social and cultural role, fund raising, governance).
The objectives of the mobility project Erasmus + KA103 (mobility of learners and staff with Programme Countries) are, therefore, the following.
- Enabling the largest possible number of students in Politecnico di Bari to carry out part of their studies at a university in a foreign country of the Erasmus+ Programme, or a traineeship in a foreign company / research center / university.
- Attracting the largest possible number of students in foreign universities to carry out part of their studies at Politecnico di Bari.
- Increasing cooperation with foreign universities through staff mobility, both for teaching and for training.
- Carrying out all the said activities in compliance with the founding principles of the EU Erasmus+ Progeamme, as described also in the Erasmus Charter for Higher Education (ECHE);
- Pursuing, in the mobility activities, the highest quality, according to the Erasmus+ / ECHE criteria;
- Ultimately, delivering the greatest contribution to the development and dissemination of modern European culture, both internally and within Programme Countries and their institutions.
People who partecipated in the project at Politecnico di Bari are: 105 students in mobility for study (42 female, 63 male), 13 students in mobility for traineeship (9 female, 4 male), 7 staff members in mobility for teaching (2 female, 5 male). Of the 13 traineeeships abroad, 4 were carried out after the partecipants’ graduation. In the framework of the project, Politecnico di Bari has hosted 50 students coming from foreign universities.
During the project a number of activities have been carried out, all with the active partecipation of students and staff, and of great value for the life of the university. In summary, they are:
- information and training of the partecipants about the aims of the project, and how to participate in it (information days, individual talks with the partecipants);
- opening of public competitions, to select in a transparent way the beneficiaries of mobility grants;
- active guidance to carry out a quality mobility, i.e. to the formulation of learning agreement tailored to students’ profiles, and to the actual completion of the planned studies;
- training of the partecipants regarding linguistic and inter-cultural aspects;
- full academic recognition of study or traineeship activities carried out abroad, following clear rules and efficient procedures;
- for incoming students, proper certification of the activities (transcript of records), in a clear and complete way, consistent with the ECTS Guide.
The activities involved, as a part of their istitutional duties, the staff of the International Relations Office, Departmental Coordinators for Mobility, and Rector's Delegates for Internationalization. To varying degrees, however, all members of the community of the university, especially teachers and students, have been involved.
The mobility of students had an average duration of five months, with an average of 26 ECTS credits earned by each student, thus achieving a performance perfectly in line with the target of 30 ECTS credits per semester. The overall satisfaction of Polytechnic students participating in the project was very high, based on the final reports they compiled on the EU portal dedicated to them. The feedback received from the incoming students has been extremely useful to understand how to improve the quality of the studies and of life in the Polytechnic, in an international perspective.
The impact of the project was, summing up, quite big, in terms of "learning outcomes" of the students, and of involvement of the whole institution in the mobility activities. In the long term the project is considered very important, along with other similar activities of international cooperation, for the modernization and internationalization of Politecnico di Bari.