The aim of the partner organizations was to strengthen our cooperation through this project by introducing virtual forms of collaboration in order to make internationalization both more inclusive and more environmentally friendly. We also wanted to develop a curriculum on ESD to prepare future teachers for the challenge of teaching about ESD-related topics and to help them become change agents in relation to the climate crisis. We wanted to involve our teaching staff and train them to be able to engage in virtual exchanges in any discipline. Increasing the number of virtual and English-language courses available to students was one of the objectives shared by all partners. The idea was to develop a jointly taught course on ESD and a broader curriculum that would give participants a certificate after attending all parts. One of the objectives was to see what each partner university thought was important when looking at ESD; in order to offer a course together, you first have to agree on the topics to be taught in the course and the competencies that participants should acquire by attending the course. This process was long, exhausting and very interesting, but definitely worth the effort.
We applied for this project because we wanted to expand our offer of virtual seminars and work together on the topic of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). In order to implement virtual or blended mobility or virtual exchange cooperations, universities need to promote them to different actors within their institutions; faculty members need to be trained; infrastructure such as digital platforms need to be suitable for cooperation between two or more partners. We focused on all these elements in our project and were successful in a) training the faculty b) creating a virtual exchange course and a pre-course training module c) Work on Moodle as a common learning platform. We chose the topic of ESD because we are convinced that we, as teacher training institutions, need to offer our students more information on this topic. Climate change and environmental pollution do not stop at national borders. This is why it is so important to work with international partners and students in this area. We also wanted to increase the number of courses taught in English, internationalize our curricula and help one of the institutions to implement elements of ESD in its curriculum.