Designing a Collaborative Learning Hub for Virtual Mobility Skills : Insights from the European Project Open Virtual Mobility

Higher education faces high requirements and challenges in today’s global world, including internationalisation as a response to globalisation. Virtual Mobility (VM) has a great potential to contribute to the internationalisation, innovation and inclusion in higher education. While it is feasible to encourage outward and inward student and faculty mobility, the main limitations include high costs of travelling and living in a foreign country, diverse socio-economic, health-related and even political issues. These barriers can be reduced by adding virtual components to mobility programs and actions (e.g. virtual seminars, virtual labs, virtual internships). This paper presents an approach for designing a collaborative learning hub for promoting VM Skills of educators and students in the European Higher Education Area. The VM Learning Hub assists to enhance the Virtual Mobility readiness of higher education institutions, educators and students through achievement, assessment and recognition of VM skills. This paper introduces the concept and the architecture of VM Learning Hub – a Collaborative and Personal Learning Environment with embedded technologies for innovative forms of skill attainment (open education, gamification), skill assessment (test-based and evidence-based e-assessment), skill recognition (open credentials, linked data) and collaboration (based on algorithm-based matching of learning groups).