Project Summary

NewM - The context

Internationalisation and mobility are an essential part of modern higher education. Nevertheless, some partners of this consortium are experiencing a decline in outgoing exchange students. This has led us to examine and re-evaluate the status quo of the internationalisation at our institutions. In this context, we have identified the following three major challenges that we would like to address through our internationalization efforts within the framework of the project:

  1. Bringing Europe together by increasing awareness and understanding in Europe.
  2. Increasing the transversal competences of the future workforce and therefore enhance their Europe-wide employability.
  3. Reduce inequalities in international education.

For this purpose, the key factors internationalisation and mobility will be reconsidered and revised. In higher education great emphasis has already been placed on internationalization, but currently widespread methods of mobility, by contrast, reach only a very limited number of students. Especially considering the many social and physically disadvantaged students in europe, this is an intolerable situation. Due to this situation, the partner institutions conducted various surveys and came to the following conclusions:

  1. interest in physical mobility on the student side is declining.
  2. students demand for more high-qualitaty international content at their home university

Approach

The main objective of the project is to develop mobility concepts using digital technologies
that can be made available to all participants of a course of study, the first target group. In order to
achieve this ultimate goal, new pedagogical concepts have to be developed, tested and implemented
into existing curricular to achieve an improved internationalisation at home. Since there are few real
examples of those new modes of mobility it can be difficult for a Higher Education Institution to
implement them. For this reason the project is also targeted at external Institutions and lecturers in
the first step to give them the support they need to do so, those are the second target group.

Outcomes

Over the course of the project, the consortium launched the virtual study programme Abroad@home in which new mobility concepts were designed and piloted. They represent the Intellectual Outputs 01 to 06 of the ERASMUS+ Strategic Partnerships.
In the framework of the Intellectual Output 07, the lessons learned were disseminated not only at the involved partner institutions but also via openly accessible seminars and various publications to everyone interested. At the heart of this is a collection of six guidelines to help understand and reproduce the educational approaches.
In order to build the capacity of teachers and curriculum designers, an experience report (The NewM Experience) as well as a general tool (The NewM Framework) was developed for the Intellectual Output 08, which is intended to support all interested stakeholders in creating comparable educational opportunities.
The final Intellectual Output 09 can be found among the publications in the form of an eBook, which offers a deep insight into the work of the consortium. This is accompanied by other publications that were produced within the scope of the project.