Context Promoting educational mobility has been in the core of European policies since the inception of the EU. Open borders for students within the EU creating possibilities for intellectual exchanges, intercultural learning and the development of a trans-European identity amongst the young generations have been in the centre of the European vision. Amongst other things, the Covid19 pandemic has disrupted this common sense together with its practice. Covid, besides limiting occasions for transnational travel, also upset teaching and learning habits, for the worst or the best. The whole education system had to adapt to online teaching in a very short time. Many teachers and even many students consider online teaching as a necessary evil, opposing it to traditional learning forms in an either-or manner, instead of envisaging exciting possibilities of hybrid teaching. Objectives With this project, we intend to support learners and teachers to adapt to online teaching in a playful and pedagogically rich manner. We will create a methodological package addressed to teachers, based on the experience of designing, implementing and testing of a special pedagogical program, combining online and offline methods. This program will offer a virtual study abroad experience for students. The partnership will implement it in a small scale format in order to test and standardize it for future more wide-scale use. With the collaborating teachers, we will create the institutional and pedagogical frame of the program and its curriculum. We will implement a one-semester long virtual student exchange, involving student groups in host-visitor relations, connecting them across internal European borders. We will document our program in a way to produce a manual for future users (teachers, trainers or youth workers). Our study abroad program will be thematic. Participating student groups will learn to read the urban space from the point of view of different scientific and artistic disciplines, from an international team of teachers. They will also learn how to conduct a small scale, collaborative research project and how to create creative and artistic representations from their research results. Students will work in small, mixed research teams which will foster the development of intercultural competency, leadership, communication and cooperative skills. Methodology The learning experience we create will involve on-line and off-line field-work, desk research and different mapping exercises. In the pilot program, 3 groups of students would participate from 3 different European countries. Throughout the semester, students will attend classes in urban studies and qualitative methodology, including artistic methods. They will also be prepared to conduct real-life and virtual fieldwork in small thematic research teams under the supervision of local teachers. Students in host countries will act as guides and co-researchers next to their visiting peers. For each student group, the program will consist of 1-month preparation, 1 month hosting and 2 months virtual visit and fieldwork in 2 different countries. Activities IO1 Preliminary research: innovative use of digital platforms for collaborative learning in tertiary education, including tools supporting student mobility IO2 Modulable curriculum for involving students in online study abroad programs. IO3 Case study: setting up, document and evaluate the pilot project. IO4 On the bases of IO3 creating a teachers’ manual for practising teachers Other activities: Dissemination: multiplier event offline and online Blended mobility for partners in the form of joint staff training Participants In the pilot program, we will involve directly 24 students and 12 teachers. Our dissemination and multiplier activities will reach directly at least 120-180 professionals, indirectly we will reach at least 10 000 stakeholders. Proposed results As a result of their participation and of the project, students will have developed their cooperative and intercultural skills, will be able to combine online and offline methods for learning and will learn how to conduct collaborative research. Teachers will have developed their digital competences and will be motivated to create and deliver blended pedagogical programs Longer benefits As a longer-term benefit, personal, professional and institutional relations will be reinforced between the 3 participating countries. Professionals of education will have more facility and confidence to experiment with blended teaching methods and the pedagogical format of virtual study abroad program will have gained legitimacy and popularity in the Europeans higher education landscape, complementing the traditional student exchange schemes. The introduction of this new format will help students, teachers and institutions to face the challenges caused by the new circumstances triggered by the pandemic.
Our program had the ambition to make student mobility possible again, if only virtually. With our project, we first of all wanted to show that learning online can be fun. We had other pedagogical ambitions as well. We did not just want a different academic program, we wanted to put the project in the service of our long-term intellectual and moral engagement. We aimed at giving students the experience of collective research – a means to teach them how to collaborate, communicate across cultural and linguistic barriers and solve problems together. The program we were to create, specifically proposed to build knowledge in the field of urban anthropology. Pushing the boundaries of ethnography, by combining two types of fieldwork, one classical, happening in the streets of cities, and the other one virtual, happening in the online space seemed to be an interesting challenge, worth taking up. Discovering the city seemed to be an appropriate pedagogical goal not only because of the topic’s inherent suitability to ethnographic methods but also because it was easy to imagine how to link learning about urbanity to larger questions of social justice – an aim that was equally important for us. We imagined as the first and direct beneficiaries of our project the students participating in our course. However, our final aim was to create a model that can serve as a resource for other educators and pedagogical experts interested in digitalization and in innovative pedagogical solutions, not the least in virtual mobility. Consequently, we intended to make available our intellectual products in a way that makes adaptation of our model easy for other learning communities and to other contexts, in its integrality or in its parts. We hoped that this model will not only inspire the academic community as a possible solution to constraints posed by extraordinary events, such as the pandemic. In fact, we see how virtual mobility can have a future in tertiary education as a complementary form of mobility, more accessible for students with disabilities, those of less economic resources, or indeed for anybody who would like to travel, but cannot immediately do it. Another, additional possible outcome of the project is the intensification of cooperation between tertiary educational institutions, as indeed it is impossible to realize such a program without international cooperation.
We applied for this project in the middle of the worldwide lockdown due to the Covid19 pandemic. Students were not only deprived of geographical mobility, but they were also often confined to their rooms, meeting their instructors and peers only online. This was a difficult period for teachers and students alike. At the same time, online learning opened new possibilities never seen in the formal educational system. We realized that the moment was an opportunity for experimentation. We wanted to create an educational program where the online learning platforms are not experienced as necessary ill, but rather like a new possibility to discover, connect and learn by doing. In preparing our project, we conducted many discussions with teachers, we even realized a short survey including teachers and students. The results seemed to be univocal: instructors and learners alike found online learning rather constraining, despite its obvious potential. Students also struggled with social isolation. Meeting other young people became quite difficult and their learning environment lacked the intellectual stimulation that a classical campus setting usually assures. Instructors were desperately looking for new methods and tools to motivate their classes in the absence of personal contact. Our project envisaged a complex response to all these different but interrelated problems and needs.