The EC presents survey results that show how strategic university cooperation helped to cope with the situation and how COVID-19 affected learning mobility.
The European Commission (EC) ran two surveys to collect the views of Higher Education Institutions and mobility participants respectively on how the COVID-19 outbreak affected their projects and activities.
The first survey targeted institutions that are part of one of the first 17 Erasmus+ funded European University alliances. Of the 117 institutions, 93 contributed to the survey. The EC’s aim was to understand better, how European Universities jointly address common challenges brought by the crisis, but also to grasp the extent to which being part of a European University has contributed to alleviating such impact. The results show that more than 60% of higher education institutions consider that being part of a European University has been helpful in addressing the current COVID-19 crisis difficulties. Besides brainstorming on common challenges and sharing good practices and solutions, Higher Education Institutions have pooled IT tools for distance learning and made their online courses available to the students from all member institutions, besides many more things. Importantly, 96% of the institutions think they would have been better prepared to face this pandemic if their European University had already been operational (they only started between 6 and 9 months ago).
The second survey targeted participants in Erasmus+ activities funded through Erasmus+ and the European Solidarity Corps (ESC). The aim was to collect views on how the COVID-19 outbreak affected the course of their Erasmus+ or ESC mobility activities. The results show that approximately 25% of the surveyed participants were not at all or only mildly affected by the situation. Of the remaining 75%, a big part continued their activities with different arrangements (i.e. distance or online learning). Of the affected participants, 75% returned home, whereas around 25% stayed abroad. As this new survey includes all education sectors plus volunteers, it adds nicely to the survey with students done by ESN in April (see SwissCore news article).
The EC estimates that around 142’801 individuals participated in Erasmus+ mobility overlapping the period of 15 February onwards and 1’050 individuals in ESC mobility respectively.
At the onset of the health crisis caused by COVID-19, some 2’000 Swiss students were registered under the Swiss programme for mobility in Europe (SEMP), and approximately 1’600 European students were studying in Switzerland. Results from a survey conducted by the Swiss National Agency Movetia and Swiss Higher Education Institutions show that 56% of the surveyed Swiss students abroad returned to Switzerland and 55% of the surveyed foreign students left Switzerland.
To plan for future mobility in Higher Education, the European University Foundation (EUF) with the support of Movetia and the University of Porto developed a Covid-19 Mobility Status tool, where Higher Education institutions can provide information on their offers for students from abroad the first semester of 2020/2021 (autumn semester).
The EC’s Re-Open EU tool allows checking for border-crossing rules. Even though it is targeted predominantly towards the tourism sector, it provides a good overview for any type of border-crossing activity.