Currently, our universities often get the following questions from newcomers from abroad: "Can I find other student groups from my country?" Our answer should be: "It doesn't matter." Project InComm wants to create truly international universities, where students and staff from all backgrounds feel welcome in an inclusive multicultural and international environment. Project InComm is proposing the following actions to integrate incoming students at all levels into one university community: • Defining a welcoming process for full degree seeking masters and PhD students that begins during the application phase (approximately 3 months before arrival) and ends with the onboarding phase (approximately the first 3 months after arrival). • Uniting the many stakeholders with various backgrounds involved in the welcoming and onboarding phases at our campuses. • Uniting and involving the target groups (Masters and PhDs) in all our discussions via sounding bodies and working groups. • Taking into account diversity in all aspects of the project to safeguard inclusion and to avoid gender, race, class, ethnicity, religious orientation, sexual orientation or disabilities biases. • Identifying key performance indicators to measure how well our communities are integrated and to continuously monitor the status. • Identifying, developing and implementing best practices in all phases of the welcoming process and also including the curriculum and innovative doctoral programs. InComm has the following outputs: • The welcoming process developed into a 'customer journey' for both masters and phd students and transferable to universities across Europe. • The InComm+ Tool for administrative staff, that provides a quick insight of the status of the feeling of belonging for newcomers. The tool gives an insight on the strong and weak points of the institutions welcome process, and links directly to projects that can strengthen the customer journey. • Training programs focussing on improving integration at home, accessible to universities worldwide, also tackling inclusion and social differences • United stakeholders per target group, with clearly specified tasks and responsibilities, at all our universities. • Sounding boards, consisting of a diverse cross-section per target group, in place at all our universities. • Repository of best practices, including projects developed within the project, directly linked to the InComm+ Tool. • Statistics about our actual status and progress. Income has the following outcomes: • A customer journey process for receiving new people, implemented at the partner's institutions. • Raised awareness for the international identity of our universities, including the benefits of multicultural and international collaboration skills for students and staff and awareness for (the benefits of) diversity at our campuses. • An improved integrated International Classroom • More integrated and inclusive communities (students and staff) with no difference between local and international members • Best practices decribed, implemented and used at European and non-European universities • Foster a maximum of interactions between as big a range of diverse populations as possible: make the local and international population open to interactions; create opportunities for interactions; raise awareness on the benefits of the interactions. • A toolkit of best-value-for-money feel-at-home solutions that will be described in a user-friendly and visible manner, disseminated during the life of the project and available for a wider academic community and any other interested people after the end of the EU funding (via ERASMUS+ platform, project website, regular and associate partners' websites, project publications, etc) The main expected impact on the project partners HEI's is the development of an efficient and strructured system that will assure a functional and organic integration of the international communities in the HEI's activities, but also in the surrounding community. From the receptors point of view, InComm is aiming to enable and facilitate each international individual integration. Everyone entering our institutes should feel welcome in one international identity, regardless of different cultures, gender, race, ethnicity, religious orientation, sexual orientation or disabilities. Full partners are: • KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden • Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands • Graz University of Technology, Austria • Institute Superior Tecnico, Portugal • Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany • Universidad Politecnica di Catalunya, Spain Furthermore, the CLUSTER Network (www.cluster.org) as a whole will play an essential role by providing inputs from new students and staff members from EU and non-EU countries. Associate partners will be asked to participate in the surveys and in the monitoring actions.
The main objective of the project was to create truly international universities and to better integrate newcomers in the university community at large: where internationals are welcomed by and integrated in existing communities. We took into account social inclusion of minorities, especially focusing on nationality, gender and cultural background, and targeted full degree Master and PhD students.In order to identify the most suitable processes and tools to integrate newcomers, we have used a Collective Intelligence approach involving the target groups and other relevant stakeholders so to develop the welcoming process into a full customer journey of 6 months. The integration of communities on campus was intended to be improved by: 1. Uniting the stakeholders into collaborating groups, with direct input from the target group, to jointly improve the welcoming process. 2. Develop a clear procedure for welcoming and onboarding with the target group in mind, the customer journey. 3. Train the responsible stakeholders, to help them implement the customer journey and its projects. 4. Finding, developing and implementing projects that have been proven a success, within the context of the customer journey. 5. Making persons at the right management level(s) responsible for the customer journey. 6. Develop strategies to enhance integration and contribute to a truly international environment. The following actions were planned to integrate internationals and nationals into one university community: • Defining a welcoming process for full degree seeking masters and PhD's that tackles the full period from application 3 months prior to coming to the university, until the first 3 months at the university, taking into account the 'onboarding' phase. • Uniting the various stakeholders involved with welcoming and onboarding at our campuses. • Uniting and involving the target group (Masters and PhD's) in all our discussions via sounding bodies and working groups. • Taking into account diversity in all aspects of the project to safeguard inclusion and to avoid biases, whether that is based on gender, race, ethnicity, religious orientation, sexual orientation, disabilities. • Identifying key performance indicators to measure how well our communities are integrated and to continuously monitor the status. • Identifying, developing and implementing best practices in all phases, also including the curriculum and innovative doctoral training programs. • Develop a tool that is graphically showing the actual status of the welcoming process and customer journey at any institute. The scope of the project was then to address the whole welcoming process, from roughly 3 months before enrollment till 3 months after enrollment. This included several phases: • The Interaction phase after application • The Introduction at the local institution, generally lasting from a day to a full week • The Onboarding phase, the first 3 months at the university in various programs (education, workspace, professional training, social activities) • The Community phase, when people are on board and can help in the process. Within every phase we took into account the processes (customer journey, including measuring tools), people (target group and stakeholders) and projects (tools, projects and best practices). The community/ambassador phase, after newcomers have had their full program at the universities, is of importance, because those people could help to improve the first three phases. The aim is to continuously improve the welcoming process, using the experience and evidence of this group. In the project this will be further supported with tools like interviews and surveys. Within the project, diversity plays an important role. The welcoming process should always take into account diversity to safeguard inclusion and to avoid biases, whether that is on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, religious orientation, sexual orientation or disabilities. The project does not take into account the recruitment process. The project has transnational relevance because of tts ambition to bring nationals and internationals to come together to discuss, analyze, propose initiatives to increase the number of opportunities for nationals and internationals to be together and to enhance the quality of integration of national and international communities. With our 6 partners and the network of 18 CLUSTER Universities supporting the proposal, we have the power to set a new standard for the welcoming process in the EU.
The project is initiated by the CLUSTER Network.(Consortium Linking Universities of Science and Technology for Education and Research), a consortium of 12 European Universities in Science and Engineering (and architecture) with associate members from around the world. CLUSTER represents a Multi-location European University of Science and Technology with about 3.000 professors, 11.000 academic staff, 14.000 PhD students, with a total of more than 140,000 students. In a world facing unprecedented challenges, engineering, science and technology play a central role.The well-being of our society depends on our answers to such challenges that cannot be founded by a single nation or engineering discipline. Instead, they call for truly international, multi-disciplinary collaboration and a new mind set. It is thus largely in our hands to breed a new generation of engineers with leadership and entrepreneurial skills. CLUSTER is an active platform in the promotion and creation of frameworks aiming to tackle these societal issues.CLUSTER has 30+ years of experience with mutual double degree programs, summer schools and working groups working on the improvement of engineering education. This experience was essential to understand the importance and implications of the implementation of the Customer Journey proposed in the InComm project. However, such a system to control or monitor its development. In a multilateral and coherent way was never elaborated in the fashion in which InComm addressed the topic. InComm was developed with the explicit intent to develop a set of tools for the integration of the academic communities on campus that benefits all the partners in the network and a number of external universities already making active use of the tool. A subset of the member of the network decided to embark in this initiative due to their expertise in the field: • KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden • Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands • TU Darmstadt, Germany • Institute Superior Tècnico, Portugal • Universidad Politecnica di Catalunya, Spain Graz University of Technology, Austria is the 6th partner although not a CLUSTER member. In order to also have a direct link to the non-EU partners, CLUSTER associated partner in the project was Tomsk Polytechnic University which actively contributed to the activities on the project until it was suspended after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. All CLUSTER partners played an active role in the dissemination of the results. InComm has been a project strengthening the truly international, multi-disciplinary collaboration and the promoter of a new mind set for our students and staff. Each partner university brought to the table its own internal regulations and practices and through CLUSTER they secured access to the world's best practices in the field. Our universities are preparing our students for the next century, where all our students and PhD's need international and intercultural skills to collaborate on the grand challenges in an international and multidisciplinary environment. Internationalization took place in a rapid pace. The percentage of international full-degree seeking students is between 15-20 percent of the total population, many of the national students go abroad, all Master Programs and some Bachelor programs are on offer in English. In recent years, comprehensive internationalization took place in our International Offices. However, we have multiple indicators that the facilities in place are insufficient to create a truly international university. At this moment, internationals do not feel integrated and start their own communities. The International Student Barometer, held at TU/e (2015 and Grenoble INP (2016), underlined the good state of our facilities, but when questioned on 'feeling at home' and 'feeling welcome' the scores are very low. Internal questionnaires show the same results: internationals (students and staff) do not feel integrated (Aalto, 2017), and that the general feeling of wellbeing of our international guests is lower than our local communities (TU/e 2016 & 2017). This is seen by all international offices and within our educational programs. Biases make our students chose for separate ethnic groups in group assignments, internationals and nationals unite in segregated communities. Our conclusions are confirmed by research. We found several studies that students from different background do not mix automatically, (Brown, 2009; Leask, 2009; Wright & Schartner, 2013), recently underlined in the Netherlands; "Simply taking in more international students does not automatically lead to internationalizing the university." (Prud'homme van Reine & Blom, 2017). For a true international community, the university needs "a dynamic and supportive institutional culture of internationalization." (Leask, 2009) And "The transformation to more culturally inclusive styles is strongly connected with a significant change in academics' attitudes and values." (Ryan, J.,2012) "As institutions continue along the path of internationalization, it is essential to explore the experiences of all groups of students and staff to understand the effects of this process and to exploit its potential to the benefit of all." (Mason & Eva, 2014)