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Higher education student and staff mobility project
Start date: Jun 1, 2014, End date: Sep 30, 2015 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Middle East Technical University (referred as METU) is a state university with 26.000 students including 2.300 international degree seeking and about 400 incoming exchange students from 80 different countries worldwide. METU has a strong research and internationalization strategy* which includes specific targets to increase qualified international students and staff to %10 of the total population. Moreover, the University gives priority to provide opportunities for its students and staff to gain international academic experience abroad. The Erasmus Program is one of the most important projects to realize these objectives and has been carried out in the University since 2004. This project includes 4 different types of mobility namely student, traineeship, teaching staff and training staff mobility. Specifically in this project, 284 METU students participated in student mobility program in various prestigious European universities. Moreover, 20 METU students and graduates took part in the project to do their internship. In addition,16 teaching staff and 11 administrative staff from different departments of METU benefited from the program. 134 inbound students studied in our university during the project as well. For outbound student mobility, 179 of the students were female and 252 of them were undergraduate students. Most of the students participating in the project were from the departments of social sciences. On the other hand, in traineeship mobility, most of the students were from technical departments. For outbound student and staff mobility, the most popular destinations are Germany and the Netherlands. One of the most prominent impacts of the programme on both inbound and outbound students is that their participation in the programme supports their social and personal development. It has been observed that students who have participated in the programme have improved levels of foreign language sufficiency, increased awareness of cultural diversity, diversified academic and work experiences and thus better chances of employability. Erasmus teaching and training mobility programmes have wide positive impacts on academic and administrative staff as well. Academic staff who have participated in the programme show higher levels of motivation for developing international cooperation projects, teaching in different methods and encouraging students and other staff to participate in international mobility projects. Some best practices in partner institutions have also been transferred to our University by means of the mobility experience of staff. By making use of the opportunity of involvement in the Erasmus programme effectively as an incentive and stressing this in promotional activities in the process of having qualified students prefer METU programs METU attained one of its important goals which is to increase student interest in METU, as indicated in the METU Strategic Plan 2011-2016. METU has achieved higher levels of internationalisation (also at home) by means of the impacts of the programme on individual participants, as mentioned above. Many administrative offices and departments have benefited from the experiences gained through the programme and obtained quality and capacity improvement to a considerable extent. * (http://sp.metu.edu.tr/sites/sp.metu.edu.tr/files/dokuman/METU_Strategic_Plan_2011-2016.pdf )
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