OLA+

The OLA+ project offered an innovative and sustainable tool to improve the efficiency of mobility management thus allowing to cope successfully with constantly increasing numbers of student exchanges.

The need for increasing HE student mobility in Europe is a long-standing political priority and the European Higher Education Area is built on structures and tools that aim to foster successful cross-border cooperation, including mobility. In order to achieve the desired results, it is necessary to have access to an adequate range of tools, modern procedures and concrete methodologies to manage the workload effectively.

Creating streamlined and less time-consuming mechanisms for universities to manage mobility flows was among the key overall deliverables of the project and the goal of proposed upgrades: the OLA+ tool strived to considerably ease the mobility management of students across the continent. The main objectives of the proposed project were the creation/upgrade of a fully functional online tool enabling HEI staff members to manage/negotiate LAs in an online environment. The OLA+ also aimed at eradicating problems of academic recognition by substantially improving the quality of the information students receive when preparing, signing and amending their LAs. In addition, online training material and a toolkit were made available to illustrate/explain how the OLA+ tool can be best used by the HEI staff members, while also providing good practices on how a LA should be managed for/by students.

Both universities (IROs, academic coordinators, university staff involved in the mobility management) and students were the main beneficiaries of a smoother LA management system, as it aimed to ensure full compliance with national procedures between sending and receiving HEIs, therefore facilitating LA management from HEIs and student perspectives. The OLA+ tool was primarily targeted at IROs and Erasmus+  coordinators, who are the key actors involved in facilitating and managing such activities.

The project was implemented by 10 partners and 21 associate partners (19 universities and 2 university networks). The involvement of large number of universities allowed developing new features and carrying out the testing phases as well as assessing the extent to which the OLA tool addresses the needs of HEIs and complies with their national procedures across Europe.

This project builds on a previous project.

Partners: University of Luxembourg (Luxembourg), Lodz University of Technology (Poland), University of Vienna (Austria), University of Marburg (Germany), University of Alcala (Spain), University of Bergen (Norway), Erasmus University of Rotterdam (The Netherlands), Panthéon-Sorbonne University (France) and the Erasmus Student Network