Abstract:

Student mobility in Europe is significantly valued and various funded programmes have been supporting it. Students participating in mobility experiences are gaining a wider field of expression, creating new friendships, raising their professional profile and improving prospects to better succeed in life. Transcultural competences and intercultural sensitivity in midwifery can be enhanced through students’ mobility. Such competencies are much needed in Europe now more than ever; midwives must have the skills to identify and understand individuals’ values and cultural beliefs in order to provide appropriate healthcare tailored to women and families’ individual needs. However, multiple barriers for student mobilities have been identified, including financial constraints, family separation, work commitments, poor integration between home and hosting institution’s programme and others.

The TOTEMM ERASMUS+ Strategic Partnership in Higher Education (2019-1-UK01-KA203-061974) aims to “promote equity, social inclusion and participation of non-mobile midwifery students studying in England, Italy, Estonia and the Netherlands through the creation and implementation of a new inclusive mobility model based on a combination of virtual and physical mobility activities. In addition, aims to investigate if the combination of virtual and physical mobility activities can develop intercultural sensitivity.” In order to achieve its aims, five virtual mobility Learning Packages are being co-created engaging stakeholders (students, academics, experts in the topics, learning technologists) in the development process. Following an appreciative inquire approach, the needs of the learners come into the foreground and allow them to inform the co-design of the Learning Packages, enabling these to be tailored to the learners’ needs. Multiple frameworks for co-creation resources have been proposed, but the ASPIRE framework, which stands for Aims, Storyboarding, Populate and Produce, Integration, Release, Evaluate, has been widely and effectively used on the development of healthcare open education resources small in size aiming to fulfil one learning objective. However, the TOTEMM Learning Packages are larger aiming to cover multiple learning outcomes, and the storyboard sessions that were planned to be delivered face-to-face in order to get advantages of creative collaborating thinking cannot yet happen due to COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, an adaptation is needed both in the process and the tools used. This work describes the modified ASPIRE framework and reports strengths and challenges of the process as perceived from the creators of the content of the Learning Packages.

While the modified ASPIRE process brings together the Learning Packages following virtual storyboarding sessions and a structured format of describing the content before the development stage, some challenges on the understanding of the process at its initial steps and organising multiple content contribution at the same time are identified. TOTEMM virtual mobility Learning Packages will not only be beneficial to midwifery students that encounter mobility barriers, but also to all the students that currently are not allowed to travel abroad due to COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, tutors, learning technologists and higher education institutions will benefit from a best practice example and the tools adjusted to co-create virtual mobility Learning Packages.

Keywords:

Participatory design, e-learning, online learning, transcultural learning, ASPIRE, ERASMUS+.