At University West (UW) internationalisation is highly prioritized and international cooperation is one of many tools for giving the students a global perspective in their education. Our ambition is to attain quality and multitude in our mobility activites in order to provide excellent possibilities for international experience and competence for both students and staff. We also strive to create a window in our programmes to allow for a semester abroad. This is done to avoid an interruption in the studies and instead incorporate the foreign studies.Our focus is to build strong, qualitative and long-term relationships with European institutions within mutual subject areas as ours, with the intention to develop a variety of operational opportunities on educational and/or research level. These are qualities we look for when choosing partners. Thus University West strives for academically balanced Erasmus partnerships and encourage deeper and/or wider collaboration with those partner universities that offer academic opportunities that matches our programs. We aim to be a reliable, valuable and trustworthy partner to our partner universities. Our objective is to build strong, qualitative and long-term relationships with European institutions within mutual subject areas as ours. In order to do so we encourage our departments to know their partner universities and the cooperation intentions in the agreements well enough to know what exchange opportunities could be promoted to and used by both students and teaching staff. To be aware of the Erasmus partner agreements and the collaborative opportunities that they offer enables us to improve quality and increase the scope and multitude of our international cooperation with partners in order to create reliable partnerships with a balanced and well used exchange flow for students and staff to benefit from. We try to focus on staff that has not yet tried an exchange and promote guest lecturing at a partner university for those who are interested.Our main focus has been set to students in first cycle and will remain so. However, in the future we aim to increase relevant mobility opportunities for students in second and third cycle in order to add a crucial international edge to the research area. We also plan to extend our collaboration with a few of ournon-EU HEl's partners to Erasmus cooperation.Another objective is to increase the number of outgoing students in order to give as many students as possible the chance to get international experience to better prepare them for a demand for international knowledge and experience on the job market. The number of outgoing students at UW is steadily raising and we use the returning student to promote Erasmus exchange by sharing their experience with the new outbound students to be. Our mobility objectives are targeted both towards incoming and outgoing students and staff. We have tried to grow our number of outgoing students by finding new ways to reach out to them. We arrange more promotion activities at more varied times than before. This enables more students to participate and get information to process about exchange possibilities. We follow up constantly during the semester before application deadline so that the students can find support for their ideas for possible exchange during preparation of the application. This year mobility activities has been more visible throughout the campus and in the class rooms. All these minor changes to how we used to work has led to a greater interest and awareness for Erasmus exchange.A major re-organisation of the central administration has had impact on how we orginise the administration during the project. We invite teachers from our partners to visit our campus in order to get to know UW and the opportunities we offer more in detail, and also to bring a taste of internationalization to the students that for various reasons don't take the opportunity to study abroad.Our intention is to deepen collaboration with some of our partners to double degree. We have a double degree cooperation today with a French partner university that works well, but are also working with a few more partners towards the same type of solution but in different subject areas.

For University West, internationalization is a quality aspect. It is not a matter for a few dedicated people but a joint effort where the strategic, academic and administrative management owns the issue and where students, teachers, researchers and administrators are involved. It is clear that responsibility is linked to the core business, the concept of integrated Internationalization is central and the teacher has a particularly important role in creating a positive international knowledge and learning environment. Internationalization is a means of achieving the highest quality in the various parts of the business. The concept thus becomes significantly broader than, for example, teacher and student exchanges.The ICM project with Mt Royal University (MtR) in Calgary was set up with the intention to establish a strong collaboration with a partner in Canada which at the time was a blind spot on the map for us. It was a continuation of a push done earlier where University West visited several institutions during a promotion tour in connection to the NAFSA conference in Vancouver 2011. The similarities in structure and mutual interest resulted in a mobility agreement and Swedish students have always been keen on exchange at MtR. With the aim to achieve balance in the mobility - making Canadian student equally interested in coming to Sweden, a joint ICM application was submitted allowing for mobility funding but more importantly a quality assured process for the exchange that would benefit the purpose and trigger the Canadian students and staff to exchange. When it got granted mobilities among teachers and staff were implemented with a clear intention to deepen the collaboration and pave way for long term continuance. Then Covid19 hit. The since long planned mobilities for key staff at MtR had to be cancelled and students currently on mobility had to return home early and finish their studies from a distance. At the same time key staff were assigned to new positions A making it hard to keep the momentum during the pandemic. A plan to revitalize the project is being discussed at the moment. A new agreement on mobility has been signed by both parties which stretches to 2025 so there is good conditions for renewed activity after the pandemic.

REPTiS offers a sustainable and energy efficient solution for responsible extraction and processing of Titanium and other Primary Raw Materials from strategic partner countries to EU supply chains with a net zero-waste approach. The project will demonstrate the capability of Titanium extraction and processing as a Critical Raw Material in collaboration with strategic partnership country Ukraine in all stages of the value chain ranging from open pit ilmenite ore mining and carbon-free Ti powder production to full-scale deployment in the EU, thanks to the commitments of the industrial partners after the end of the project. Demonstrating an approach towards zero waste manufacturing by means of energy and resource efficiency, and by a validation using real parts from the industry, the project will go beyond the state-of-the-art in terms of maturity (from TRL 5 to 7) and hence contribute to the European Green Deal.

The 2017 Erasmus+ call was the largest call for a long time for University West. The ambition was to allow as many persons as possible to go on exchange and the focus has been on building strong alianses with preferred partners not beeing restricted by a tight budget. At the same time it has been a period of big transitions at the University. The long time Erasmus Institutional Coordinator moved on to other assingments and the International office restructured, a new system and database for mobility has is beeing impelemeted so it has been a period of much uncertainty and there are some things we need to, steps to be taken in terms of quality aspects in our processes.A council for strategic internationalisation have been installed and they are working with the Educational Program Managers to structurally implement internationalisation in all programs at the University. The Erasmus+ program is an important tool in that work. Looking at the numbers for mobility it is striking how the focus on preferred partners has given a lot of Staff Exchange (STT-P) this call. This acitivity is the most suitable for setting up long time relationships. It is the School of Business and IT that has been most acitve compared to other departments or schools within the University and for example in the Autumn of 2018 they sent a 10 person delegation to visit their preferred partner UNIVERSITE DE VALENCIENNES ET DU HAINAUT-CAMBRESIS, France to further deepening the collaboration and discuss the Double Degree Program in Business Administration. The collaboration is strong and there are some ideas for deepening it and work for more collaboration and perhaps joint applications in the future. Also the Human Resource (HR) program has moved to the school of Business and IT from the department of Social and Behavourial studies during the period to better fit with common standards in the rest of Europe. A teacher in psychology has been and continues to be very active there and has a strong relationship with Heretsfordshire in the UK. Thanks to his efforts a delegation of more than 10 students and 3 staff came to visit for a week of studies and enterprise visits in the region. They are anxiously waiting for the Brexit result to be known so they know the basis of their future relationship. At the ENGINEERING department a new, very active Coordinator have signed a lot of new agreements with partners. A Doulbe degree arrangement has been agreed upon with Université Montesquieu-Bordeaux IV. The department has also produced a large amount of courses thaught in English on all levels now avaliable for Incoming students. The connection to the large research Group in Production Technology has been improved and the next step is to structurally work with PhD Mobility.The school of Nursing also have a new coordinator and she have beeon focused on agreements for practice placements. There are now options for nursing students in the UK, Portugal and Italy if they want to go on Exchange and the number of students doing this is increasing to our great joy.

This project will innovate Nordic traditions of education to strengthen recruitment for teacher training programmes and at the same time improve the legitimacy of this profession. The background is a decrease in number of applicants for teacher training programmes and a weakening of the foundation of applicants measured by e.g. grade point average in upper secondary school. Even if there are differences between countries and between educational programmes, becoming a teacher is generally not a popular choice among young people. There may be several reasons to this rejection of teachers training programmes. In this project we will focus on what will be described as loss of meaning and shaping of meaning. Young people choosing this career path have traditionally done so to help other people, i.e. as an act of altruism. This has been and still is a leitmotif in the education programme. However, learning targets, tests, evaluations, and external interests seem to increasingly impede on this leitmotif. The risk is loss of meaning and a growing rejection of the teacher training programmes. Thus, the project will attempt to strengthen recruitment for teacher training programmes by innovating and reintroducing Nordic forms of education which are assumed to increase sensemaking among student teachers. Keywords are democratic bildung, involvement of student teachers, and creation of teaching methods which respect and at the same time qualify the leitmotif of wanting to do something (good) for someone else. More precisely, the project will develop and implement four actions to increase sensemaking – one of each partner. At University of Southern Denmark, the action will focus on collective learning groups which is an already tested method to involve and qualify the preunderstandings of student teachers. At VIA University College, the action will focus on developing students’ attitudes with respect to two core values in the education programme: (1) social responsibility and participation in the knowledge society; (2) integration of students’ life history in the development of a professional identity. At Högskolan Väst, the action will concern an ongoing attempt to shape work-related learning. This is a special programme where student teachers alternate frequently between work and school in order to better integrate theory and praxis. At University of Agder, the action will develop and further qualify an attempt to stimulate collaboration (co-creation) between teachers in the education programme, teachers at practice schools, and student teachers. The aim is to increase sensemaking among student teachers at campus as well as in training periods.The project will include 16 participants from 4 partners: 4 from each partner. From Denmark, the partners are: University of Southern Denmark and VIA University College; from Sweden, the partner is: Högskolan Väst; from Norway, the partner is: University of Agder. The partners are institutions which offer teacher training programmes and do research in this respect. In addition to the mentioned participants, the project will include students, other teachers/researchers, and leaders at the involved institutions. The project is expected to produce results such as Nordic forms of education emphasising democratic bildung, involvement, and sensemaking, scientific and popular publications, among others a textbook for the Nordic teacher training programmes, tutorials and marketing materials aimed at increasing the number of student teacher applicants. The project is expected to impact students’ and teachers’ meaning formation and level of satisfaction, number of applicants and composition of applicants in the Nordic teacher training programmes. Furthermore, at the EU/international level we hope to contribute to more widespread use and greater recognition of the Nordic school tradition.