The Home and Away Forum - "Coaching Exchange Students from a Distance"

The final event of the project, the "Home and Away Forum", was organised December 1st, 2010 in collaboration with the EU-VIP project as a pre-conference event of the Online Educa Berlin conference. This full-day workshop dealt with two different types of virtual mobility: the Move-IT project focused on virtually supporting students who are physically mobile; the EU-VIP project looked into how virtual mobility can enhance and facilitate international work placements. In the morning representatives of higher education institutions, the business world and students presented their views on these topics. In the afternoon there were two parallel sessions, each focusing on one specific project. For Move-IT the afternoon consisted of a poster session presenting best practices of virtual and blended mobility, followed by round table discussions addressing the following themes:

• The European Commission's aim is to reach 20 % learning mobility by 2020. Is this feasible? How can virtual mobility contribute to this goal?
• Which cultural and language issues need to be taken into account while implementing virtual mobility? How can virtual mobility contribute to the development of intercultural competences?
• Starting from the best practice cases demonstrated during the poster session: are these examples applicable within your own institution?

The full programme of the workshop can be viewed here

Presentations:

• Virtual Mobility & the Move-IT project, Mart Achten, EuroPACE, Belgium
• Virtual Support: Best Practices from the VM-BASE Project, Ilse Op de Beeck, AVNet-K.U.Leuven, Belgium
• EU-VIP: Virtual Mobility and Work Placements, Mariet Vriens, K.U.Leuven-AVNet, Belgium
• Virtual Mobility: Higher Education perspective, Prof Dr Wim Van Petegem, AVNet-K.U.Leuven, Belgium

Report discussion session