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Mobility of higher education students and staff supported by internal policy funds (KA131-HED) - Coordinator: LUCA SCHOOL OF ARTS

2022-1-BE02-KA131-HED-0000568422022Mobility of higher education students and stafffinalizedGood practice
Countries: BE|AU|AT|CZ|EE|FI|FR|DE|EL|HU|IS|IE|IL|IT|LV|NL|NO|PL|PT|ES|SE|UK · Grant: €218,260

Objectives

This mobility project builds further on experiences from earlier mobility projects conducted by LUCA. The main objectives are 1) the enhancement of the quality of teaching and research programmes through international cooperation and 2) offering academic, professional and personal development opportunities to students and staff. A third ambition is the ‘Mobility for All’ target to have a larger amount of students tasting an international experience through physical mobility. This was the second project managed under the Erasmus 2021-2027 framework with a project duration of 2 years. The report includes principally mobilities activities in AY2022-2023. After the pandemic our ambition was to bring the numbers of mobilities again on the increase, and to support more short-term blended mobilities to BIPs. This project clearly fulfilled this ambition, as it is the first of its kind where mobility numbers overgrow the available budget. We consider BIPs as interesting alternatives for students who have fewer opportunities for long-term mobility or who are afraid to embark in individual and longer mobility pathways. BIPs also provide alternative collaboration formats in those degree programmes that have difficulties in setting-up classical mobility pathways. BIPs also lower the threshold for some students as students move in groups and support each other. To avoid that too many students drop out due to financial reasons or limited scholarships at the start of the project we decided to raise our budget by transferring OS funds to SMS/SMP. As a support measure to maximize the number of mobilities we also provide an internal co-funding budget ‘LUCA Break-Out’. As regards to staff mobility, compared with our 2021 project when we didn’t achieve a growth in numbers, with this project we achieved one of our highest staff mobility flows ever with a total of 36 mobilities. Partially this growth is linked to the increased number of BIPs LUCA is involved in and LUCA’s academic staff in the course activities which translated further into a rise in STA volumes. A second explanation is the rise of training activities. In 2022 LUCA started to encourage professionalization actions under the format ‘LUCA Stimulate’. LUCA Stimulate is both a centrally- managed budget for professionalization activities and application flow for all units and programmes at LUCA. Applications by administrative and academic staff are submitted at central level and on a weekly base evaluated together by the LUCA HR department and International Office. International training activities are checked if the activity meets the Erasmus STT requirements and if they do applicants are informed about the Erasmus STT funding possibility. Thanks to this action we were also able to introduce Erasmus to a group of staff who have never before participated in Erasmus as well as international mobility.

Project partners (1)