Abstract:

The need to boost innovation in the European Union finds one of its major obstacles in the shape of its Higher Education (HE) system which, although considered the key knowledge engine of Europe, is still fragmented and requires to undergo a deep process of modernization in order to tackle an increasing intra-EU innovation divide.

In this context, one of the main intervention logics has been the promotion of transnational cooperation both in research (mainly, framework programmes) and education (mainly, with the Erasmus+ programs). In this effort, mobility plays a pivotal role. It allows to pool together competences and resources without draining local and regional knowledge ecosystems, which are essential in conjugating excellence with cohesion, securing a distributed landscape of talented human capital, synergetic resources and maintaining a local absorptive capacity. In a nutshell, such a trade-off can be addressed when human capital can be moved rather than drained.

However, mobility goes beyond the transnational dimension. The divide between the academic and business/social sectors has been often emphasized, translating in a weak capacity to transform ideas into tangible value and ensuring a bi-directional knowledge flow by means of intersectoral mobility. In this sense, there is a clear need to foster a stronger cooperation between HE Institutions and public/private organizations.

From another perspective, it has been long observed that innovation lies at the boundaries between different knowledge domains, where discontinuities can spark. This clashes with a HE system in which intra and inter-institutional barriers are the norm, framing scientific knowledge into silos and departmental logics. This emphasizes the need to enable new forms of interdisciplinary mobility, allowing for a stronger contamination between diverse knowledge domains, following the increasing focus of the the EU innovation effort on societal challenges, which are clearly interdisciplinary in nature.

In this paper, we present the “C-Extended” Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership. This project aims at contributing to the EU effort in overcoming borders in HE, exploring mobility opportunities beyond a geographical dimension. In the paper, we discuss how the project views mobility also as that occurring from theory to practice (intersectoral) and from theory to different theory (interdisciplinary) while exploring new opportunities to complement and conjugate the needs of students in mobility by means of blending learning.

We will analyze how the C-Extended project pursues this vision by designing, testing, monitoring and evaluating an Interdisciplinary/Intersectoral/Blended-Mobility Scheme (IIBMS) targeted at the moment to master’s level students. We will also illustrate how the project aims at piloting this scheme through the mobility of 30 students coming from a core ICT domain. These students are offered to undergo, transnationally, an interdisciplinary pathway (either energy-climate or socio-economic), engaging also in an intersectoral experience, all supported by blended learning. We will finish by discussing the results obtained so far since the beginning of the project in fall 2017. Ultimately, the aim of the C-Extended is its own name: to contribute to extend the Erasmus vision a step further.

Keywords:

Interdisciplinary education, inter-sectoral mobility, blended mobility, pedagogical innovation.