The project AIMED has been created to change the perception of Erasmus+ student mobility and promote the most valuable component of exchanges that is its academic dimension. One of the goals of the European Union is to double the number of mobile students and reach 20% of mobile students by 2020. Moreover, the Europe 2020 Strategy defined support for the internationalisation of European HEIs as an important goal with regard to cooperation between HEIs. By the provision of an innovative tool for HEIs to advertise their course offer the partners of the project aim to contribute to the realisation of this goal The issue has been recently raised whether students should have a say in courses' content and if they should be adjusted to their requests. There is a risk of academic knowledge to drift towards commercialising and this definitely would not be a good direction. Nonetheless, courses should embrace students curiosity, hunger for knowledge, stimulate them to develop themselves in thinking and working effectively. The mobility should be considered as an investment for future life.
Therefore the project aims to foster the quality of the student mobility by the delivery of a platform that would contain the educational offer of higher education institutions presented in an attractive and comparable way. Apart from the provision of regular information on the courses offer the platform will also contain methodologies, videos from the classes, “taster courses” and multimedia presentations, as well as the profiles of the lecturers. These resources will help the candidates to investigate profoundly the educational offer and make an informed decision based on the academic grounds. The materials will be student friendly and meant to give a sneak peek of how the participation in the course would actually look like. The project is aimed to reach out to an estimated number of 10000 participants involved both directly and indirectly; the partners will focus on local and international students and universities that take part in Erasmus+ programme or are involved in other mobility schemes.
The project will be implemented according to the ADDIE methodology. The stages of this methodology will find a reflection in the organisation of intellectual outputs and each of them includes important milestones that are the indicators of progress. ADDIE includes five complementary stages: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation. The main result of the project is a platform (understood as an online space) where higher education institutions will be able to promote their educational offer to potential foreign incoming students. The main result will be supported by the development of the following activities:
-- organisation of focus group activities with the students (2 in each partner institution) based on the dedicated framework;
-- summary reports of the partners from the focus group activities as the basis for the consolidated partners’ report;
-- functional platform analysis aiming to map the needs of the students for the purpose of platform development and to define the functionalities of the tool;
-- design of the platform transforming the objectives defined in analysis into a blueprint of the tool and finally into a prototype;
-- templates for describing the courses – standardized description will help students to find all necessary information and facilitate the decision in which institution they wish to study during their mobility time;
-- evaluation of the platform and its content, based on the dedicated framework, by the students, HEIs, as well as the mobility candidates in partner institutions;
-- publication of the Guidelines exploring the ways for presenting the academic offer for exchange students and sharing good practices applied in AIMED project. The publication will also constitute a detailed guide on how to use the platform for both, staff of higher education institutions, as well as their students. The Guidelines will be a real support for HEIs that decide to join the platform and would lead them through the subsequent stages of educational offer preparation.
The project aims to initiate a substantial change in the way the student mobility is perceived in Europe and bring it to the new level that promotes the academic dimension of the exchange over other benefits. Consequently, the project will contribute to improving the prestige of the Erasmus+ programme.