As a specialist in internationalization, I want to strengthen of our student's global competences and give them tools to so that they can show proof of their global competence to working life. I want to help them stand out.
Vesa N was was excited about the idea, and we decided to put our wise heads together and work towards creating the Centria Global Competence Open Badge. Here are Vesa's reflections and ideas about the badge.
The badge we are planning is intended for students who have participated in student exchange or who have done a work placement abroad.
Students acquire a wide variety of skills during their stay abroad and the most clear ones are these:
Language skills in a real context
Cultural understaning and tolerance
However, there are many hidden competences that students acquire that are harder to put a finger on. CIMO and demos Helsinki have made a study to identify the needs of working life, and see if they match with the skills that students acquire during their studies or work abroad. There were many matches, and we will use this study, together with other facts as a basis for our work.
We will create Centria Global Competence Badge for students that will give them a badge where their abilities, skills and competences will be presented in a virtual format. To obtain the Centria Global Competence Badge, the student must participate in a training course that will place before, during and after their exchange. This course needs to lead to ECTS credits.
They will present Centria at the foreign University and participate in a debriefing when they have returned.
Students will be encouraged to be international tutors or to participate in International study sessions at Centria to tell about their own experiences abroad. This will help Centria increase the knowledge among students about the benefits of exchange studies or work placements.
An Open badge must be accepted by the receiver in order to be activated. The challenge is to make the Centria Global Competence Open badge attractive for the students. It is also incredibly important to make the Centria Global Competence Open badge known to working life. They need to know what it is. Why students have received it. What skills they have obtained to get the Badge.
We will work together with i.a. Centria's communications department to get an attractive graphic character to the badge, how to communicate about the badge to working-life etc. We will also need to get the training course into the study plan, so that we can help students get added value of the exchange. We will also need to plan the training course and include exchange studies as a course folder in our learning environment (Optima).
This will be a team effort and I am looking forward to the results! I see a lot of developing and work ahead :-)
