VERSATILE Project

Like many other universities, the Covid-19 pandemic forced a sudden shift at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences from in-person teaching to distance and hybrid approaches. The sudden lack of physical mobility – affecting both students and educators alike – was something that HSRW needed time to adjust to.

In reaction to this new situation, the European Union’s Erasmus+ Programme initiated a special call for proposals for projects that could better equip educational and vocational training systems to tackle the challenges of online and distance learning.

Together with the University of Derby (UK), Masaryk University (Czech Republic) and Tampere University of Applied Sciences (Finland), Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences submitted a joint project proposal in response to this open call: VERSATILE – Virtual Education Readiness Semester – Adaptive Toolbox for an International Learning Experience.

VERSATILE is a response to the academic challenges of the pandemic, seeking to develop, test and evaluate the necessary building blocks for a successful, collaborative online semester abroad. Together, the project partners are developing:

• guidelines for online teaching methods;
• a model teaching plan for courses in the social sciences; and
• guidelines for administrative support structures.

With VERSATILE, the project partners have set out to develop feasible alternative solutions to physical mobility/exchanges for students during the height pandemic and for the future. Universities will acquire new tools and opportunities for their students to experience internationalisation while in their home countries, when, for example, traditional academic exchanges abroad are currently not possible. The project also provides a chance for educators to improve their online teaching methods and share knowledge and experiences with their colleagues at partner universities. VERSATILE also serves to identify useful administrative paths and infrastructure for assisting students and educators with bureaucratic hurdles to international mobility.

The project’s objectives are:

• Identify and develop the building blocks for a successful online exchange semester.
• Create a shared online exchange semester among participating partner universities.
• Develop guidelines and a toolbox of online teaching methods.
• Draft a model curriculum for social science modules taught by a team of educators.
• Create guidelines for developing the requisite collaborative administrative infrastructure for an online exchange semester.
• Implement and evaluate the results of online exchange semesters at participating partner universities.