DAAD funds digital collaboration for ‘blended mobility’

The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) is funding 60 new projects in its International Virtual Academic Collaboration (IVAC) programme. Funding is being provided by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

The COVID-19 pandemic is a huge challenge for international academic cooperation, especially with regard to stays of students and academics abroad. With the IVAC programme, DAAD is supporting individual teachers and students as well as universities in intensifying international collaborative schemes and worldwide mobility in higher education with digital means.

IVAC support ranges from developing innovative collaboration formats to developing digital skills among higher education staff and students and using cross-institutional digitalisation processes in studying, teaching or mobility.

“Blended learning with its various online and offline teaching elements becomes ‘blended mobility’ when digitally aided instruction is augmented by collaborative components in an international context,” DAAD explains.

The organisation aims for “entirely new teaching and learning arrangements which are student-focused and collaboration-based, unimpeded by geographic or time restrictions. Research orientation and project work are examples of didactic approaches which can provide structure to virtual exchange scenarios and cultivate a network between instructors and students.”

The first call for applications, in 2020, already resulted in 61 cross-border digital collaborative projects. The second call, which ended in May, has enabled a further 60 projects to be launched. The new projects cover a wide range of contents.

Evangelische Hochschule Dresden in Saxony is to run an interdisciplinary, collaborative project with partner universities in Finland and Austria on “(In)Visible Women in Social Sciences and Social Work” focusing on topics relating to the UN Sustainable Development Goals on ‘Quality Education’ and ‘Gender Equality’. Here, teams of students compile educational comics in digital collaboration formats which are then provided to the public as teaching material.

RWTH Aachen University is to cooperate with the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy in the field of water and energy management, the focus here being on virtual co-teaching and co-learning. Students will work together as digital avatars in semester projects.

Projects in the first round of funding included “Digital Teaching in Atmospheric Science and Nanotechnology”, run by Mexico’s Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM) and Germany’s University of Bremen.

A further project between the University of Düsseldorf in Germany, the University of Pretoria in South Africa and Kyung Hee University with campuses in Seoul and Suwon in South Korea focused on “International Cross-site Teaching”.

To contact Michael Gardner, e-mail michael.gardner@uw-news.com.