BEST+

The Blended Erasmus+ Staff Training (BEST+) introduced the innovative concept of blended staff mobility to give higher education institutions a cost-efficient incentive to actively contribute to the professional development of staff members. 

Giving academic and non-academic staff the opportunity to engage in mobility schemes themselves while simultaneously engaging with colleagues through a blended online approach increases the impact of international cooperation further by equipping staff members with the right skills set.

The project piloted the format through three distinct blended mobility trainings of different formats and created a platform for HEIs to host their blended mobilities, including both the promotion of the on-site events and provision of online learning material.

Furthermore, the project created Open Educational Resources (OERs) for three topics that can be reused by any HEI to start using blended staff mobility: Intercultural learning, marketing of universities for international students and international student experience.

Allowing staff members to level their knowledge before going on a mobility, meeting their peers online, as well as engaging in quality learning content has had an enormous impact on the learning outcomes of participating staff and we believe that the format is future-proof and will help to create more adaptive and better-qualified staff members. The latter will have a direct impact on how well student mobility is perceived by students and institutions, thus increasing the likelihood for students to go abroad and therefore increasing the quantity of student mobility.

The project results are underpinned by guidelines on how to utilise the platform and how to run your own blended mobility scheme at your institution.

Partners: University of Alcalá, Erasmus Student Network, University of Latvia, University of Eastern Finland, University of Lodz, Nuvole