Practical placement of students in enterprises is an important part of the current University curriculum, with direct influence on the employability of the future graduate, as it facilitates the first contacts of the student with the real life environment in a small scale professional exercise. In many European countries there is a good practice and valuable experience in organizing this typical activity of U-E cooperation (for example in Germany, France UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy etc), based on regional reference centres for practical placement that achieve the necessary bridge between the two sectors, such as the practical placement be profitable for both parties: a quality educational stage valuable for the training programme and at the same time a small contribution to the enterprise activity.
However, these best practice cases are rather scattered in Europe and by now it is obvious that they will not self generalize unless accompanying measures are established at a European level. Moreover, while the trans-national mobility increased dramatically in Europe thanks to actions like Erasmus, and Leonardo, the trans-national practical placements fall now out of the quality system established by the existing reference centres as the direct contact (i.e. cooperation) between the sending university and the receiving enterprise is much more difficult because of the distance.
In this context, it is obvious that an institutional building approach to create U-E cooperation mechanisms with distributed sites operating throughout Europe is urgently needed in order to cope with the quality issues raised by the increasing number of trans-national mobility flow for practical placements in the context of the continuing growing mobility of students in Europe. Therefore a European sub-network of reference centres is proposed to be established within EUE-Net in order to undertake the mediation and quality control of practical placements both at local and European level.
Workpackage planning:
| Task ref. |
Description (What) |
Methodology (How) |
Deadline (When) |
Task coord (Who) |
Monitoring / Quality indicator |
| 1.1 | Defining the final structure of the Core group of partners within the network and definition of the SNet mission. Activity planning |
Technical meetings: - 1 meeting face to face - Email Communication |
Month 5 | Univ of Karlsruhe (Edmund Zirra) | List of the SNet 1 partners available on the website |
| 1.2 | Workshop on "Best practice in quality models for Practical placement in Europe" | Within the Annual EUE-Net Conference | Month 8 | Corvinus Univ (C Forgacs) | Proccedings published |
| 1.3 | EUE-Net Taskgroup and proposal for a European model for Quality Control of Practical Placements (EQCPP) | Research and elaboration of an official EUE-Net document | Month 18 | Leonardo centre Turingia (F. March) | Model description and authors on the website |
| 1.4 | Support for a pilot project to validate EQCPP: providing framework for European debate, adopting and promoting it at European level | Workshop within the 2nd EUE-Net conference on EQCPP | Month 24 | Univ Transilvania (Doru Talaba) | - Pilot project defined - Conf. Proceedings |
| 1.5 | EUE-Net Guidelines for Quality of Practical Placements of students in European Enterprises | Research and elaboration of an official EUE-Net document | Month 30 | KOOR/BEST (Edmund Zirra) | External evaluation of the WP |
| 1.6 | Roadmap for implementation of EQCPP | Research and elaboration of an official EUE-Net document | Month 36 | Univ Karlsruhe (Edmund Zirra) |