ErasmusX

This innovative project aims to offer students the possibility to increase the impact and add professional value to the Erasmus period abroad by combining certified online academic studies with professional and social experience overseas. This new learning proposal supports study and placement mobility as an additional value to the current internships being done abroad.

Trailing the proven students’ interest in carrying out in-company training during their Erasmus+ programme, several obstacles come to the fore that prevent students from taking full advantage of participating in part-time placement schemes:

– The schedules of the academic courses do not allow to combine both the studies and the part-time placement;

– The part-time placements do not often lead to any formal learning outcome and therefore recognition of credits.

The ErasmusX approach will allow overcoming the challenges outlined above, in particular, the incompatible and scattered course schedules. Likewise, it will allow exchange students to do placements abroad combining online and traditional on-site courses with possible hands-on learning experiences in companies or further events/activities. In this way, when students study abroad, they will not only be able to benefit from studies at the host university (which is their primary goal), but on top of they will be able to do placements and have a systematised infrastructure of online courses.

The rationale of the project is, therefore, to increase Erasmus student opportunities by creating a joint online directory of courses to ensure a wide variety of options for certified formal training. This action will provide an opportunity for students to study at their pace and at the most convenient time while still having an opportunity to gain practical/professional experience abroad.

Partner universities will select and develop online courses on different predefined topics, and will jointly create an attractive directory for students to choose from. The initial focus areas, decided by the project consortium universities, will focus on Education, Business, Economics,  Engineering, and Computing. This approach will allow universities to open their curricula for placements, therefore achieving and ensuring stronger focus on employability.

Relevant added value to the programme will be the institutional recognition of the online courses facilitated by the transnational cooperation among universities.

Partners: University of Alcalá, University of Latvia, University of Naples Federico II, Technical University of Lodz, European University Foundation