A project to bring new tools for managing international relations.
The meeting helped the team look back at the project, assess the goals achieved so far and share expertise between partners.
The seven EUNICE International Relation Offices (IRO) met on 29th April in the University of Catania, in Italy, as part of the Peer-IR-View Project, aimed at identifying tools and programmes that can standardise knowledge, skills and know-how of IRO human resources in order to be able to respond to the challenges that higher education systems increasingly face in the international area.
This second face-to-face EUNICE meeting held at the Central Palace of the University of Catania was, for the teams involved in the project, the opportunity to look back at the main project achievements for the last 20 months, such as the creation and implementation of a benchmarking aiming towards a better acquaintance of the consortium’s IRO between themselves. These issues were discussed by numerous delegates from Poznań University of Technology in Poland, Brandenburg University of Technology in Germany, University of Cantabria in Spain, University of Mons in Belgium, University of Catania in Italy, Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France in France and University of Vaasa in Finland. It was also the opportunity for the project coordinator (Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France) to provide the partners with a complete financial report and forecasts about the upcoming months. Transnational meetings -the first one was held in November by the University of Mons, Belgium- facilitate comparison between representatives of project partners and allow verification of project activities implementation, management and monitoring results.
Apart from that, most of the day was dedicated to presenting the progress of the knowledge management and peer-assist tools that are the main expected outputs within this project. Seven tools or toolkits are currently being developed: each partner university coordinates its own tool and associated task force.
This first “batch” of tools aims, for instance, to facilitate the arrival of new staff in their department (guides, videos) and/or to strengthen their competencies and knowledge over time (mentoring system, training sessions between peers).
The majority of the tools should be finalised this summer and published by autumn 2022. Stay tuned!
Peer-IR-View Project is part of the actions promoted by the EUNICE partnership, funded by the Erasmus+ programme, and designed to help students to find employment and to encourage internationalisation.
