Experiences from an International Student and Staff Exchange Program and Some Still Unsolved Mysteries

This paper describes an ongoing exchange program between 20 partner universities; eleven from the European Union and candidate countries and nine universities form Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, where a bilateral mobility flow between the European and the neighboring countries is implemented. While the idea of this program initially intended to focus on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) subjects only, it was later opened to students from all academic fields. Nevertheless, the better part of all participating students is from engineering disciplines. The described program encompasses undergraduate, graduate, and PhD students as well as postdocs and academic staff. By broadening their technical education, we think that all participants benefit from the reevaluation of their own cultures that occurs while functioning as part of another culture and communicating in a foreign tongue. Over 100 scholarships were awarded in the first year of the program and this number was exceeded for the second year of the program, which started in September 2009. The allocation process for this year is still underway and we expect to see a similar number of scholars in this third and final phase of the program. A part of the scholarships at the graduate and undergraduate level was granted to credit-seeking students. The rest of the graduate, undergraduate and all PhD scholarships were awarded to degree-seekers. One of the challenges that showed up was that, surprisingly for the Arab students and us, accrediting a degree obtained from some European university turns out to be much easier than getting a credit for just a single lecture attended at the very same university. The reasons for this are quite obvious: on the one hand, as a consequence of the Bologna Process, every European university today uses the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) as a standard for comparing performance and achievement of students while on the other hand, all the partner countries are using the American academic system. Actually, one of them is an American university, i.e. the degrees awarded are officially registered by the Board of Education in New York State. First experiences are reviewed, including the not exclusively academic obstacles that we had to overcome in teaching and learning within these different educational systems .We will also report on a survey, which we will conduct to learn about the students’ experiences and thus assure the quality of their mobilities.