Higher education student and staff mobility project (2016)

Unipi Team Leader: Francesco Marcelloni, Vice-Rector for International Cooperation and Relations

The University of Pisa (UNIPI) aims at expanding it's internationalization policy in both qualitative and quantitative terms.
Key partnerships have been established, some of which directy coordinated by the University of Pisa.
Thanks to the signing of bilateral agreements, the university has built a network of trusted Erasmus partners representing all eligible countries. This network is a result of the extension to new teaching areas of the existing agreements yielding positive results of interest to students.
Furthermore, the University of Pisa has increased its presence in the Erasmus + Mobility programme with its well-established participation in the Consorzio Traineeship (Traineeship Consortium), coordinated by the University of Padua.
The university has established tactics aimed at encouraging mobility and enabling an ever increasing number of students to make the most of the opportunities offered by the Erasmus + programme.
For this purpose, the university has allocated a budget to co-finance the EU Erasmus funding and to integrate it, and it has created a Portal for both incoming and outgoing Erasmus students (ErasmusManager). This is intended to facilitate the mobility-related procedures for students, for the professors coordinating internationalisation (CAI) and for the administrative staff who deal with mobility.
As for the number of participants, we have effected a total of 743 student mobilities (for both study and traineeship purposes), 38% of which are traineeships. Indeed, this type of mobility has prompted an 11% increase in traineeship mobility compared to the previous year.
In addition, in order to support the mobility of students with special needs, a special service has been set up, in collaboration with the Services Unit dedicated to the integration of students with disabilities – USID. This provides these students with a personalised support system according to their specific needs, including the filling out of their application for ad hoc EU funding.
As part of its policy to promote the integration of refugees in the education and training system, throughout the academic year 2016/2017 the university applied for and obtained 5 OLS licenses, which were assigned to several students singled out through collaboration with the local Italian Red Cross. A special meeting was organized with refugees and Red Cross volunteers to illustrate the opportunity of language learning offered by the university through the OLS. In order to overcome logistical and technical difficulties for the effective use of the licences, the university has been working to ensure that the students have access to its WIFI network and to its equipped computer stations thanks to the collaboration with the university’s Linguistic Centre (CLI), which has made available its staff and workers.
The main goals of our university are to encourage incoming and outgoing student and staff mobility, to increase the number of programmes offered in English and to increase the mobility of non-teaching staff, whose training is particularly important to provide the appropriate administrative support for internationalization.
For this purpose our University has organized two Staff Training Weeks focused on: “Best practises on Internationalization” attended by several colleagues from different european countries. Both these experiences were really useful to enhance comparability and develop good practises and best governance in the internationalization sector.

Coordinator:  UNIVERSITÀ DI PISA  (Italy) 

Start date: 01-06-2016

End date: 30-09-2017

EU Grant: 1.275.962 €

Project website: https://unipi.erasmusmanager.it/studenti/