About the VERSATILE Project
The VERSATILE project addresses the challenges that higher education institutions faced during the outbreak of the Corona epidemic, suddenly having to shift to online or hybrid teaching formats and looking at a collapse of physical student and teaching mobility. The project aims to meet these challenges by developing, testing and evaluating the necessary building blocks for a collaborative, multilateral online semester abroad in the form of
Online Teaching Guide
a guide for online teaching methods, including a toolbox for hybrid education
Online Curriculum
a model curriculum of team-taught modules in the social sciences
Guidelines
guidelines for developing a common administrative and organisational infrastructure for joint online semester, offered by multiple partners
By doing so, VERSATILE seeks to create viable alternatives to physical student mobility during the pandemic but also to look beyond and enable higher education institutions to offer new internationalisation-at-home possibilities to students who traditionally face mobility barriers.
Furthermore, it provides educators with the opportunities to develop their online teaching methods and enlarge their teaching experiences and skills through collaborative teaching with colleagues from different institutions. It enables administrators to create infrastructures in which administrative barriers to student and teaching mobility are more manageable.
WHAT DO WE WANT TO ACHIEVE
THE PROJECT IDEA
Building blocks for an online semester abroad
Create a collaborative online study abroad programme
Develop a guide/toolbox for online teaching methods
Provide a model curriculum of team-taught modules in the social sciences
Produce a guide for the development of a collaborative administrative infrastructure for an online semester
Implement and evaluate the online semester abroad at the participating partner universities
WHO ARE WE?
PROJECT PARTNERS
The VERSATILE strategic partnership project consists of four participating universities:
Masaryk University from the Czech Republic
Tampere University of Applied Sciences from Finland
University of Derby from UK
Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences from Germany
The project partners already collaborate as part of the Hague Network, a European Network of universities founded in 2017 to share capabilities and best practices and jointly develop new internationalisation initiatives.
WHAT DO WE DO?
ACTIVITIES
The groundwork of VERSATILE is laid in a state-of-the-art analysis of online teaching methods and infrastructural conditions in the partner institutions. This forms the basis for creating a guide to online teaching methods suitable for international classroom settings with diverse student groups. A curriculum of team-taught modules under the topic of “European Scenarios in Business, Politics and Societal Change in the next Decennium” is jointly designed and prepared. In order to facilitate the smooth delivery of the online semester abroad, guidelines for creating an effective administrative infrastructure are developed. These elements are put into practice when the online semester abroad is delivered to students at the project partner universities.
Responsibility for the activities is spread between the project partners. Working groups made up of experts from each partner on the different areas of the project – educators, administrators, curriculum developers, didactic experts and experts on online teaching methods – will ensure that the results are achieved collaboratively. In order to identify best practices and develop the guidelines and curriculum, a number of methods are used, in particular feedback interviews and questionnaires with educators and students in the participating universities, the joint training of educators in online teaching methods and piloting through mini team-teaching episodes. The intellectual outputs are also tested in the delivery of the online semester abroad to students of the project partners.