Guidebook: Ways of enhancing intercultural competence building at HEIs

Containing general strategies as well as specific suggestions for HEI on how to enhance global competence building among staff and students, drawing on theory and current best practices, and making better use of the many existing opportunities for international exchange and cooperation. The guidebook will include a set of recommendations and guidelines, and will serve as a roadmap for improving practices strengthening transversal competences, thus increasing capacity and professionalism of students and practitioners to work at EU/international level.


The guide is now available for download:

Toolkit for assessing global competence of engineers

We are pleased to share the toolkit for assessing global competence of engineers, and the impact of training and international experience.


The toolkit will allow for easy, more rigorous, assessment of competence by HEIs and employers. Using the toolkit, HEIs and employers can both measure the level and profile of individuals’ competence, and assess the effect of interventions and experiences, e.g., training and international exchange or cooperation. Being able to identify strengths and weaknesses, more effective means of improving competence can be planned. 

On the personal level this could refer to focused training on specific competencies while at the organisational level this could translate to embedded mobility curricula or otherwise improved education.

The toolkit will help validate international experience, thus promoting meaningful internationalisation and increase the capacity of professionalism of engineers to work at European/international level.


Please, we invite you to participate, use and share this wonderful tool that we hope will be to your liking and interest.

Now available: https://surveytavie.industriales.upm.es/

TA VIE PROJECT AT INTED CONFERENCE

During March 8, 9 and 10, 2021 in Valencia, Spain, preliminary results of the TA VIE project were presented at the 15th International Technology, Education and Development Conference (INTED). INTED is one of the largest international education conferences for lecturers, researchers, technologists, and professionals from the educational sector. After 15 years, it has become a reference event where more than 700 experts from 80 countries will get together to present their projects and share their knowledge on teaching and learning methodologies and innovations on educational technology.


INTED2021

Paper presented:

SCENARIOS BASED APPROACH TO ASSESS GLOBAL COMPETENCE IN ENGINEERING MOBILITY PROGRAMS
I. Ortiz-Marcos1, L.I. Ballesteros-Sánchez1, V. Breuker2, A. Hernández Bayo1, R. Rodríguez-Rivero1
1Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (SPAIN)
2Universitá di Milán (ITALY)  

Abstract:

The global world requires an essential emphasis on sustainability regarding productivity and industrialization processes, all the more with current environmental issues—water supply, deforestation, climate change—as well as sanitary issues like COVID-19, which permeate throughout and threaten all global activity. The development of the TA VIE project presented here stemmed from an international collaboration of five European HEI institutions in Spain, Italy, France, Sweden and Hungry. The TA VIE project has shown that companies understand the relevance of global competencies and young professionals should improve in those competencies. Companies in the five national contexts participating in the project argue that engineers should deploy these competencies to follow market trajectories and face current challenges. As a result of the first intellectual output of the project a framework of global competencies for engineers was published. Now, in this second part of the project, we are ready to share how to measure these competencies with engineering students using an innovative approach. In this paper the result of scenarios designed to measure global competencies is presented.  

Keywords: Global competence, Competence Assessment, Scenario approach, International experience, Engineering.

A Framework of Global Competence for Engineers: The Need for a Sustainable World

News: we want to share with the entire TA VIE community that a research article (open access) has recently been published within the framework of the development of the project, with the aim of disseminating the preliminary results of the project as well as the most outstanding findings of the early stages.

We hope this research article is of interest to you!


Abstract

This paper presents the results of the first part of the Tools for Enhancing and Assessing the Value of International Experience for Engineers (TA VIE) project, launched in 2018, and outlines a contemporary understanding of global competence for engineers, as understood by European engineering companies. Striving to make engineering education more comprehensively aligned to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and thereby meeting demands from industry and society, the notion of “global competence” has attracted more and more attention from engineering schools. While there is no universally agreed on definition of global competence, the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) definition, which explicitly combines global awareness and intercultural communication competence with sustainability efforts, seems potentially well positioned to inform higher education institutions’ (HEI) global competence education. This is perhaps especially so when it comes to international student mobility, an area which is regularly seen as an important means to enhance global competence while all too often being assessed not in terms of qualitative student development, but in terms of structural indicators. However, in order to assess and improve curricula and mobility programs, the desired learning outcomes must first be specified. Based on research in five European countries (Spain, Italy, Sweden, France and Hungary), this paper details the understanding, requirements and perceived skill gaps of companies hiring engineering graduates, a first step towards improved and assessable global competence education for engineering students.

Keywords: global competence; internationalization; engineering profession; qualitative research; European comparison


Sustainability 202012(22), 9568; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12229568

Download PDF: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/22/9568/pdf

Intellectual Output 1 comes to light!

Framework for Global Competence of Engineers

We are pleased to share the following informative leaflet detailing the preliminary results derived from the first Intellectual Output (IO1). For this purpose, as previously reported, this work developed by the project team during the first year of the project will be disseminated to the stakeholders through several multiplier events.

These events are taking place in each of the participating countries which will present the framework of IO1. It will be an important sounding board point for further work and will be used to collect the opinion of the target groups. These opinions are taken into account for further work on the next IOs.

We encourage everyone to participate and hope you like it.!







More Info – Multiplier Event at UPM – MADRID:

https://blogs.upm.es/tavie/2019/12/05/i-jornada-competencias-e-internacionalizacion/