Blended Academic International Mobility: tearing down barriers to mobility in a sustainable way

Modern economy requires engineers to excel in collaborative and communication skills at an international setting. However, these competences are not usually addressed in engineering curricula. In the Blended Academic International Mobility course, Blended-AIM, students develop their capstone project as members of an international and multidisciplinary team while working at their home institutions. Team members are geographically spread to assure heterogeneous teams and to promote international cooperation. This paradigm, although very suited for engineering degrees, can be adapted and applied in any project/internship course unit. The results from the first 10 editions of the course that ran between 2009/10 and 2018/19 support our initial hypothesis that Blended-AIM significantly promotes students’ soft skills without requiring costly and time consuming changes to prior degree curricula. It has the additional benefit of tearing down most of the barriers to international mobility in a sustainable way. In 2019/20 we are running the 11th, edition of the course and planning to transfer this innovative educational paradigm to new partners outside EU borders.