Short-term international mobility and its potential to develop students’ soft skills: A case-study of a Blended Intensive Programme

Abstract

The Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme is a short-term, academic internationalisation opportunity of 5-30 days, integrated as part of the participating students’ home curriculum. Erasmus+ encourages transformative, challenge-based and work-integrated learning designs, with the goal to strengthen students’ employability and their global competence. This includes developing soft skills such as intercultural understanding, empathy and critical thinking. The goal of this article is to determine what soft skills students develop during a Blended Intensive Programme and what is an effective learning design for that development. An in-depth single-case study with students from four European universities and mixed methods was performed. The qualitative data, which consists of 70 reflective reports, and the quantitative data, which consists of a survey with 32 respondents, were compared and contrasted. The results demonstrate that students developed 25 soft skills, pertaining to the categories being, thinking, relating, collaborating and acting. Five factors with implications for the effectiveness of the learning design were identified: student role, variation, cultural immersion, real-world experiences and time. The visiting students described a higher motivation to pursue an international career and a higher perceived increase in employability. They also described more experiences as transformative and identified a higher number of soft skills than the host students. The experience of cultural immersion associated with cross-border internationalisation is a plausible explanation. Recommendations for improvement are to give host students increased responsibility as “buddies” for visiting students, strengthen the contact with industry through work-integrated learning activities and prioritise student-active and collaborative activities in multicultural groups.