The training will continue to be offered to universities on demand

Improving the intercultural competencies of university staff, increasing knowledge about internationalisation, improving attitudes towards the topic and, above all, a more open mind are the results of the project Systemic University Change Towards Internationalization (SUCTI) coordinated by the URV. The training activities have reached 258 staff members at 6 European universities and have improved the competencies of staff so they are better equipped to attend to the needs of an international public and to help open their institutions up to the world.

The members of the SUCTI project consortium and other institutions (60 people in total) have met at the URV to present the results to the university community and to propose continuing internationalisation training once the project finishes. Work is underway to develop a 15 hour training course on internationalisation that can be taught at other universities on demand.

University staff training has been a central element of the project since it began in 2016. The training is in two phases: the first phase trained the trainers, and in the second, these trainers then taught their colleagues at their own institutions, reaching up to 258 people. To evaluate the impact of the project, the participants were asked to complete a questionnaire before the sessions, another immediately after the sessions and a third after four months.

Uwe Brandenburg, from Global Impact Institute, explained in the meeting in Tarragona that the project has “significantly improved attitudes towards internationalisation” among those who received training. The most important result, due to the difficulty in changing personality traits, is the increased receptiveness towards internationalisation, which increased from 3.54 out of 5 to 3.87. Intercultural competence also improved from 3.84 to 4.08 out of 5, as did knowledge about internationalisation (from 2.87 to 3.68 out of 5) and attitude (from 3.95 to 4.07).

This has led to a change in the dynamics of the participating institutions and has incentivized the improvement of certain services so they are better able to attend to an international public.

The institutions participating in the SUCTI project are the URV, the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Italy), the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu (Poland), the University of Porto (Portugal), Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen (Germany), the EAIE and the Global Impact Institute. The training materials used throughout the project from 2016 and 2019 can be found on the web.

The meeting was one of the activities of the URV’s International Week.