Motivations and outcomes: a study of an intensive international course

Abstract

In this paper, we study what motivates students and university teachers to do intensive international courses, and how they evaluate the outcomes. The study is based on three years of an Erasmus funded Intensive Programme on ‘‘Implementing Europe’s Future Broadband Infrastructure’’. It consisted of a course held each year 2012–2014 during two weeks of July, where 30–35 students and 10–12 teachers from the 4 participating universities would meet in one of the partner institutions. The course was organized with a week of course modules, followed by a week of project work based on real-life problems from companies, where students would work in groups mixed across nationalities and educational backgrounds. The topics of the first week, were defined to support the project work in the following week. Each year, by the end of the course, all students and teachers filled out evaluation forms addressing motivation for participation and their assessed outcomes (teacher’s motivations were only evaluated in the last year). This paper presents these results, together with the key learning points obtained during the three years. We observe that the motivation for participating is quite balanced and include both academic and cultural factors. The students’ travelling activities also emphasizes the ‘‘European experience’’, which is less for students in the host institution. Students following programmes not taught in English, also have an opportunity to practice a foreign language. The teachers are highly motivated by both personal and academic factors, especially by the desire to develop and experiment with new teaching methods. The analysis of the outcomes suggest that an international project with students and teachers from different cultures and learning traditions brings significant added value.