EPIC: Making Multinational Student Projects Happen

EPIC (Improving Employability Through Internationalization and Collaboration) is an Erasmus+ 3 year Strategic Partnership, which explores how blended learning can support multinational and interdisciplinary student projects. In this way it searches to combine the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of virtual collaboration with the benefits of physical meetings for establishing the collaboration. It is carried out in collaboration between eight European universities and two companies. This paper describes the experiences from the first year, where seven different projects with a total of 25 students were carried out during spring 2018: The projects differ in terms of group sizes, student workloads, and academic levels. Even though the projects are different, a similar structure is defined throughout the semester: In particular, all students follow a short virtual course before the semester starts, then all students and supervisors meet for a one-week seminar in February. From there the collaboration is mainly virtual, with the possibility for each group to meet one additional time. By the end of May a joint report has to be submitted. This paper describes how the projects were set up and executed, along with evaluation results and experiences. Overall, all stakeholders found it to be a good experience, but also with some challenges: A main contribution of the paper is the discussions of two of the most challenging aspects, namely, how to facilitate that the students actually work together when evaluated according to their home university rules as well as how to facilitate supervision in a setup like this, which is more complex than usual problem based learning projects.