Project Description

Context

The enhancement of cross-border mobility of VET learners, trainers and staff has constantly been a reference in terms of increasing quantity, quality and effectiveness of the opportunities for building personal curricula through learning experiences abroad.
The Erasmus+ Programme transversally fosters mobility of learners, educators and staff of educational institution across the different level of education. The Budget of the Programme was and is concentrated up to 60% of the overall investment in mobilities.
As a result the number of mobilities has dramatically increased, also as a consequence of the choice of switching the Grant requests from individuals to institutions, requesting the last a big effort for being prepared to manage high number of mobilities.
Within this context the project partnership, composed by VET institutions that are active in the field of Mobility both as hosts and as sending institutions have identified a specific area in which important step forwards should be addressed, that is providing VET Schools and Agencies with a stronger capacity to perform the daily management of high number of mobilities through digital based tools and processes.

Target Groups

The project addresses the needs of the 4 main actors in terms of the daily management of all the tasks that are part of the process of an appropriate planning, management, reporting and assessment of VET mobility initiatives:

• Internal staff of the sending institutions
• Internal staff of Hosting institutions
• Staff of Companies hosting WBL mobilities
• Participants in mobility initiatives

Objectives

The objective of the SoftMob project is to answer to the needs of all the actors playing a part in Mobility Projects and experiences, by providing them with:

• A complete software helping them to reduce the administrative and management burden of the different activities in order to better concentrate on the quality of the contents
• A set of direct testimonials of the different protagonists to be used as referential Best practices to improve the effectiveness of the management of Mobility initiatives

Outputs on Completion

The creation of a complete Software (IO2) to be used cooperatively by all actors playing a part in Mobility initiatives in order to appropriately manage the different administrative, coordination, monitoring, assessment and reporting tasks that are demanded reducing the operative burden and allowing to concentrate on the quality and consistency of the mobility experiences.

Through the planning, implementation, testing and exploitation of the Software the SoftMob project will achieve the following results:

• Sending institutions will be able to manage high numbers of mobilities (e.g. VET school organising a mobility for 100 VET students) minimising the impact of the administrative burden through operative tools allowing the staff to autonomously and effectively manage all the tasks related to the organisation, the monitoring, the assessment and the reporting through clear, automatic and replicable processes.
• Hosting institutions, mainly tutor and administrative staff, will be able to interact directly and effectively with sending institutions and beneficiaries of the mobility initiative, through digital based processes and communication, in order to simplify the administrative burden through automatic, replicable and standard digitally based activities.
• Companies hosting WBL based mobility initiatives (e.g. job shadowing, study visits, internships etc.), through their tutor will have the possibility to easily interact with the VET institution tutors, manage effectively administrative tasks including training agreements and regularly fill in reporting and assessing tools.
• VET students and mobility participants will be able to easily access all the information related to their mobility initiative, manage autonomously and directly their documents and regularly report and evaluate their commitment to the foreseen tasks.

Through the creation, use, dissemination and exploitation of a specifically designed Toolkit for the Management of Mobilities the project will also provide all the actors with exemplary best practices addressing selected challenges related to the management of the different phases of the mobility preparation, implementation and follow up.
The best practices in addressing the challenges will take the form of direct interviews with the protagonists, allowing the users to have a direct, practical oriented and easy to use reference learning material to be used to improve the effectiveness of their work everyday activities.