NordPath

Network for co-creating new paths for Nordic internationalization in higher education

The University of Copenhagen (UCPH) has partnered with universities from Stockholm, Iceland, and Finland in a new Nordplus project titled, ”NordPath- Network for co-creating new paths for Nordic internationalization in higher education”.

The project ran in the period between June 2021 and August 2024, and its purpose was to design an online course that will help students’ at the participating universities to develop intercultural communicative competence.

As part of the project, the participating universities have benchmarked their experiences regarding intercultural communicative competence development of students in order to develop and offer the joint online course. 

The course was piloted in the spring of 2023 and was offered as a ECTS-bearing course  across the four universities in the autumn semester of 2024 with the title "Interacting across cultures: developing awareness, critical reflection and skills". 

Another objective of the project was to create a network in order to strengthen the collaboration between the international coordinators from the partner universities in order to establish more possibilities for internationalization across the Nordic region in the future.

 

In the first phase of the project, the partners presented and benchmarked each other’s best practices in intercultural communicative competence and collect information to a shared platform.

In the second phase, the partners planned the course building on experience and already existing courses but with a special focus on practical, hands-on collaboration activities taking place in an online classroom. In this phase, partners also defined the scope and structure of the course and the needs for the learning platform where the course was jointly organized.

In the third phase, the partners developed and prepared the course materials as well as an implementation guideline. The partners also planned and arranged the practicalities for the implementation of the joint virtual course, includning when and how the teaching as well as examination could take place. Finally, steps were taken in order to secure materials for further use of the course

 

 

The University of Helsinki is the project manager.

At UCPH, the project is coordinated by the Department for Education & Student Services at the Faculty of Humanities. CIP is contributing to the design of the online course in intercultural communicative competences by sharing experiences from former projects that focused on language and internationalization, such as “The International Classroom” and “The Language Strategy”.

Other project partners are University of Stockholm and University of Iceland.

A range of meetings hosted by each project partner have been planned and carried out throughout the project period.

You can follow the progress of the project at the Nordpath site at LinkedIn.