Home and Away. ET-Solutions For Mobile Students and Teachers

Mobility of students, teachers and staff has always been one of the most important features of universities. But the growing success of Erasmus and other exchange programmes have revealed a new need for students to get more and better guidance and support. Virtual Mobility, enabled by the use of educational technologies (ET), therefore is becoming increasingly popular as a substitute and/or complement to the traditional mobility programmes in order to support the mobile student of tomorrow in an efficient and effective way. This paper first provides the experiences gained in three pilots conducted in the framework of the European VM-BASE-project, that make use of a variety of technologies and tools to virtually support physically mobile students in one way or another. In most cases, a blended approach was adopted, in which these virtual activities have been combined with face‐to‐face experiences. Based on the pilot results, guidelines for International Relations Offices and student mobility coordinators have been formulated. The paper furthermore introduces the EPICS project which aims to work from Virtual Mobility projects such as VM-BASE towards mainstream Virtual Erasmus schemes and programmes.