The Project

About the project

Presidents of the 3IN Alliance
(Left to right: The presidents of the original 3IN Alliance higher education institutions after signing the cooperation agreement in Paris: Jean-Pierre Astruc, President of USPN, Tapio Kujala, Rector DIAK, Robert Grebner, President FHWS, Ioan Vasile Abrudan, President UniTBv, Francisco Chicano, Vice President International Relations Uni Malaga, João Luís Nogueira, President ISAVE
Bård Mæland Pro-Rector VID).

Since the beginning of 2020, the project FHWS 3IN (integration, inclusion, involvement), is funded by DAAD.  It aims to actively approach the challenges of globalization and digitalization in the field of higher education. During the three-year pilot period, the Faculty of Applied Social Sciences (FAS) and the FHWS International Office will work hand in hand to form form a project team. As a team, we want to create accessible structures for students, staff and partners as well as to expand our network of European partners and strengthen international exchange.

In 2018, the strategic University Alliance of Integration, Inclusion and Involvement, 3IN-Alliance, was founded. This alliance now consists of four European higher education partner institutions based in Finland, Norway, Portugal and Germany. The partners have set themselves the task of finding joint answers to the challenges of the 21st century. To them, it is important to include students, staff and lecturers as well as the expertise and diversity of each higher education institution in the process. Following the motto “no one is left behind”, the project team is on a mission to bring Europe closer together and to communicate European values.

FHWS 3IN is a project supporting the 3IN Alliance in all of their tasks and projects. We as a project team focus on advancing the role of FHWS as UAS with European reach by initiating individual projects and fulfilling our own project goals.

 

 

Project goal

In addition to strengthening the cooperation with the 3IN Alliance, the FHWS 3IN project team aims to advance the internationalisation of FHWS. Throughout our University, we want to sustainably develop the area of mobility, enhance intercultural competences of all members of FHWS and encourage them, as well as international incomings, to take part in a mobility. In the interest of sustainable development and in line with the challenges of the 21st century, our focus also lies on simplifying mobility by digitalizing and therefore facilitating the administration process. In this context, we want to initiate a new consulting and information structure concerning the topic of mobility. In addition to the area of mobility, another main goal of our project is the expansion of transnational teaching. By developing specific measures, we want to make the role of FHWS as an UAS with European reach more visible.

 

As a project team, we maintain a lively exchange with the management team of the 3IN Alliance in the form of regular coordination meetings and are hereby contributing the strengths and expertise of FHWS to the higher education alliance. Through the bundling of resources and expertise as well as the use of synergy effects, this close and cooperative collaboration allows us to achieve excellence in research and teaching activities to an extent that would not be possible for each higher education institution on its own. In turn, we use our resources to transfer newly acquired expertise to FHWS in order to generate new knowledge and promote innovation.

As a project team we are working towards increasing the intercultural competences of all members of FHWS by supplementing and expanding the concepts of Internationalization@home at FHWS with new (digital) components, for example the Intercultural Certificate and KomPass International. By involving our European partners of the 3IN Alliance, the circle of participants will be expanded, as well as the programmes will be raised to a new trans-European level in terms of structure and content. FHWS 3IN hopes that the resulting personal contacts will increase the mobility of all FHWS members and establish a qualification programme that is helpful to all students of the higher education institutions in the alliance. We are hoping that an innovative support system for mobility will be created in process.

The FHWS 3IN project team not only wants to motivate members of FHWS to take part in mobilities, but also to simplify the administration of mobilities through digitalization measures. Within the guidelines of the new Erasmus+ programme generation, we are focusing on the harmonisation of recognition structures and processes within the 3IN Alliance. In addition to simplifying the transfer of academic credits, we also want to be able to give information in advance on the creditability of compatible modules. On our way, we are planning to implement new digital tools in order to customise the individual study and mobility experience as well as to make it even more flexible.

We fast-track the development and expansion of offers taught in English and concepts of transnational teaching by initiating suitable teaching units for both the students at our partner Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) as well as for the students at home in the field of applied social sciences. Offers such as summer and winter schools as well as international weeks for all the members of the alliance are planned to be supplemented by mobilities in order to serve the aim of a trans-cultural teaching exchange. Meanwhile, the digitisation of curricular and extra-curricular teaching contents as well as the use of digital tools for teaching and learning promotes the trans-cultural exchange at the participating partner HEIs. At the same time, we aim at using this exchange to design a concept for short-term mobilities.

In the context of FHWS 3IN, we want to implement a new consulting and information structure for mobilities of FHWS members. The goal is to design a "map of expertise" with which suitable experts for specific mobilities can be found. This map will first be available for experts in the Faculty of Applied Sciences (FAS) and our International Office (HSIN), but will later be expanded to other faculties and at last to the entire 3IN Alliance.

We carry out public relations and lobbying work coordinated with the alliance partners, which not only serves to make the progress of the project visible, but also to disseminate and, above all, make use of the project results. In addition to the general public, we are addressing people from the fields of politics, civil society and educational institutions at a regional and professional level.