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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
Salford is an ambitious University, with over 20,000 students contributing enormously to the local economy. Our expertise is transforming individuals and communities through excellent teaching, research, innovation and engagement. We have a long standing tradition of working in partnership through the Erasmus+ programme in order to deliver our mission and meet the needs of the communities we serve. Our strategic goal to internationalise the University and our Education and Student Experience Sub Strategy are both embedded in the 126 mobility activities we have supported through our Erasmus+ project this year. Our courses open doors to rewarding and challenging careers in health, science, engineering, arts, built environment, media, music, law and business and we have completed impressive work with business and industry partners by encouraging our staff, students and stakeholders to view the world from both a local and global perspective and disseminate their learning on the project back into the Schools and communities. The average number of recognised ECTS or equivalent credits was 45 and 74% of our outbound students got full recognition of their completed activities. This year we achieved 95% of our planned number of participants in the grant agreement and 100% of staff and nearly 92% of students were very satisfied or rather satisfied with their mobility experience in general.
Our completed Erasmus+ project has extended our international engagement across 23 countries; contributed to teaching and research goals via 19 teaching placements, extended our influence and reputation throughout Europe – and in many ways created a more powerful and recognised brand for the University of Salford as a higher education institution of choice for international participants. The University of Salford is unique; we are proud of our University and of our place in the world, the countries with the highest inbound participants from the University of Salford were Spain (21), France (16) but we have a powerful global reach and the opportunities we have supported through the Erasmus+ project has strengthened an international network beyond our closest countries.
The University's strategy is guided by our values of diversity, fairness and respect which has also shaped our inter-institutional agreements. It has been our aim to expand our network of European partners and to work with them to enhance the learning outcomes of our students and, through collaboration around research, professional development and community benefit, increase our impact on society and build mutual force for the long term. Over the past few years we have developed partnerships with institutions in over 20 countries to enable us to offer mobility opportunities across Europe and this year we have achieved 68 student funded with EU grants for inbound mobilities for studies between the different programme countries, with an average duration of 6 months. All of our inbound participants get a warm welcome at Salford and out of the 123 inbound participants, 91% stated that they were satisfied with their experience at Salford.
56% of our outbound participants were female (44% male) and our main area of focus has been to mirror that diversity within the student body inbound here to Salford and also to widen participation by preparing outbound students and offering more dedicated support to prepare for mobility; almost half of our outward students going on a mobility for studies placement this year were from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The Erasmus+ project has contributed to our learning and teaching strategies. We have begun to embed an international orientation across our programmes by welcoming students and staff from different countries to the University and we have increased the number of UK-based students who are eligible to study and work abroad as an integral part of their programme. One of our objectives of the project has been to prepare all of our students to compete effectively in a global employment context. The main benefits the project has brought us is the development of employability skills through the outward mobility for study, work and volunteering and also by promoting foreign language learning opportunities to all our students. We have brought closer links between our Erasmus+ activities and our University-Wide Language Programme and students have been introduced to new ways of learning to support their professional development.
One of the themes within our Education and Student Experience Sub Strategy is to meet the needs of our students, industrial and educational partners by offering "real world", value-adding experiences to students which prepares our students for life. Through our 39 different student mobility for traineeships, our students have benefited from the business, industry and employer links we have established across Europe and through the opportunities for placements, work experience and internships.