Discussions

Your Name and Title: Anne Fox

School, Library, or Organization Name: Uni-Key (EU project)

Co-Presenter Name(s): None

Country from Which You Will Present: Denmark

Language in Which You Will Present: English

Target Audience (such as primary school teachers, high school administrators, students, etc.): VET students and teachers, university students, international office staff

Short Session Description (one line): Facilitating entrepreneurial skills across borders

Full Session Description (as long as you would like):

I will be presenting an example of a project in which universities, SMEs and students are working together to create a useful personal development online course for interns interested in developing their entrepreneurial skills. This type of collaboration between business and education is rare even though many argue that it is desirable.

A foreign internship can be a great addition to the CV but as with all learning experiences it has more value if it is facilitated in some way. The two year Uni-Key project, supported by the European Union, encourages students to seek internships in small and medium-sized companies where they will have a greater chance to witness global entrepreneurship in action as well as having a closer connection to the person who drives the business.

UniKey is developing and piloting an online training for these trans-border SME interns which will help them reflect on important aspects of the entrepreneurial skillset such as confidentiality, ethics, patents, self-organisation and intercultural issues. Participants will complete tasks about their own placement as well as working with interns in other countries on joint collaborative tasks. In this way participants will learn both from their own internship and that of others.

In developing the online training the UniKey project faces some challenges such as:

• Developing a course which is relevant across borders and across continents
• Developing a course which both business and universities value
• Creating meaningful tasks which can be completed on top of a fulltime job
• Connecting cohorts of interns to work together even though they may be at different stages of their internship
• Creating tasks which can be completed with less than optimal connectivity
• Increasing the value of the internship to the SME by sharing relevant new developments from the student’s home institution

To help us meet these challenges we are implementing best practice quality assessment methods and we have also built a Quality Board of volunteer members from universities, SMEs and students who can cast a fresh eye on our proposed tasks.

Both the project and the Quality Board consist of partners from all over Europe and South Africa which means that we practice what we preach in the area of international collaboration using digital tools.

My session will present the structure of the online training and show some sample tasks after giving a brief background of the project. By November we will have some pilot participants and I will be able to include some sample profiles of students and SMEs involved.

I will end with an invitation to join our second pilot which is due to start in March 2013.

Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session:

http://www.uni-key.de/

http://annefox.eu

http://ec.europa.eu/education/erasmus-for-all/