From June 12th to 14th, the International Relations Offices (IROs) of EUNICE partner universities gathered in Mons, Belgium, for the Peer-IR-school. The purpose of their meeting was to receive training on the tools developed within the Peer-IR-view project.
With the project coming to an end this summer and most of the tools now being operational, this “Peer-IR-school” was a real opportunity for International Relations staff coming from EUNICE universities to discover and test some of the tools:
- “The IRO Benchmarking toolbox”, a set of surveys and data visualization solutions enabling any partnership, consortium or alliance to map its partners’ operational and strategic information;
- “The IRO video pills handbook”, on the use of platforms and sofware dedicated to IROs;
- “The peer-to-peer expert session handbook”, a guide to organise peer-to-peer training sessions in universities;
- “The Mentoring Programme”, already in place in the International Relations field, that aims to be extended to other units to strengthen the links between EUNICE partners;
- “The Student activities toolbox”, a set of tools to implement student activities more easily;
- The “IRO Welcome toolbox”, a toolbox composed of procedures, advice and sample documents to help IROs welcome and integrate new staff members.
All the tools will be published and downloadable from the project webpage between July and August 2023. Three tools are already available:
This event was also an opportunity for participants to preview the first version of “The Erasmus Champ” card game, developed by EUNICE partners under the coordination of the UPHF which aims to test their knowledge of the Erasmus+ 2021-2027 programme.
About Peer-IR-View
The emergence of new tasks and the need for new skills oblige universities to (re)train permanent staff, or to rely on competencies-based recruitment. Given this context, Peer-IR-View has two main objectives:
- Preserving knowledge at the university and corsortium level in the field of International Relations (IR), by developing knowledge management tools.
- Gaining the necessary skills for efficient internationalisation by developing a peer-assistance system in order to retain and improve the quality of activity and project management.
Peer-IR-View aims to improve the capacity of International Relations Offices by developing IR competence and preserving IR knowledge, thus building new skills and capabilities to support the necessary organisational transformations, to meet expectations from funding bodies, and to improve knowledge retention. It helps experts improve the capacity of IROs to overcome their challenges.
