Authors:  Mgr. Kateřina Janků, Ph.D. & Mgr. Jana Bortlíková

The Silesian University in Opava entered the academic year as a proud member of the just officially established STARS EU alliance of European universities, which we see as a key and most significant moment in the field of internationalisation throughout the whole period, which had a formative influence on the direction in which internationalisation activities continued to take. It is very satisfying to note that our faculty, and in particular some dedicated academic staff, have been able to engage very actively in closer cooperation with partners within the Alliance. Among the most notable results were the launch of two Erasmus+ strategic partnership projects "Innovation in and through Local Governments" and "Breaking Fences", and we have already seen concrete results when, in the latter project, we sent a total of five of our students and two teachers to an intensive one-week course at the partner university in Bragança, Portugal, in mid-June. In addition to these two projects, we continued our involvement in the Thematic Interest Group (TIG) "Healthy Ageing" and later in March in the newly established TIG "Inclusion and Social Justice". We then had the opportunity to personally consult further development of the cooperation with representatives of the partner universities during our visit to Aleksandër Moisiu University in Durrës, Albania in autumn 2023 and subsequently during our participation in the Alliance's annual conference in March. We intend to continue the activities we have started intensively in the coming academic year and hope to achieve further successes.

But of course we cannot forget to develop and continue our involvement in traditional forms of international cooperation with our long-standing and new partners within the Erasmus+ programme. Once again, we have successfully expanded our portfolio of partner institutions by concluding a total of eight new inter-institutional agreements across all institutes, extending a number of existing agreements or reaching out to new potential partners.

·        In addition to active cooperation with partners from Sweden and Portugal on the Breaking Fences project, the Institute of Paramedical Health Studies established cooperation with the St. Elisabeth University of Health and Social Work in Bratislava and expanded cooperation with the Slovak Medical University.

·        The Institute of Special Education was the most active in establishing new contacts, concluding four new contracts with the University of Silesia in Katowice, the University of Evora, the University of Franche-Comté and the University of Roma Tre.

·        The Institute of Pedagogical and Psychological Sciences has concluded two new partnership agreements with the University of Gdańsk and the University of Silesia in Katowice and has started to cooperate more closely with Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun.

·        The Institute of Public Administration and Social Policy managed to conclude two new agreements with the University of Economics in Bratislava and the Hanze University of Applied Sciences.

Thanks to the new and existing contracts, we have carried out the largest number of international student and teacher mobilities in all mobility programmes on the Erasmus+ platform.

Within the framework of student mobilities, we have sent a total of seven students on a study stay: two students went to Valencia, Spain, and the other students studied at Slovak universities in Trnava, Prešov and Bratislava. In this academic year, for the first time in history, we sent two groups of our students to the Blended Intensive Programme Erasmus+, in both cases to Poland, in the winter semester hosted by the University of Economics in Katowice, and in the summer semester by the University of Gdańsk.

In order to support student mobilities to partner universities in one of the most represented countries among the offered destinations, i.e. Poland, we organized a workshop in November under the guidance of Prof. Elzbieta Napora to promote cultural and linguistic competences of students and teachers in Polish language.

However, our greatest success in the field of student mobility was particularly in the category of practical traineeships, where we achieved an all-time record total of 12 outgoing students. We are very pleased that the interest of our students reflects the academic nature of our professionally oriented study programmes and that we can also provide students with practical experience abroad that they will be able to use in practice in their future profession. In this respect, the most active students are by far the students of the Special Education programme, who accounted for two thirds of all students. They carried out practical traineeships in a Czech primary school in Daruvar, Croatia, and another four students in a kindergarten for children with special educational needs in Castelnuovo del Garda, Italy. Two students from the Institute of Pedagogical and Psychological Sciences went to a home for the elderly in Portugal, and two students from the Institute of Paramedical Health Studies went to health care facilities in Madrid or Bratislava.

You can read about the experiences of our students abroad, including photos, here.

We believe that the interest of our students in foreign experiences will be at least as great in the next academic year; we already have a total of nine students interested in studying at universities in Croatia, Slovenia or Slovakia, and another four special education students want to go again to educational facilities in Croatia and Italy.

The results achieved in the area of foreign students' arrivals are also very positive. During the academic year, a total of six students came to the Faculty under the Erasmus+ programme, three students each from universities in Spain (University of Valencia and Complutense University of Madrid) and Poland (University of Opole and Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warszaw). In addition to Erasmus students, we have always accepted one student from Slovakia for one-month mobility within the CEEPUS programme in the winter semester and two Polish students in the summer semester. Based on the applications submitted, we expect very similar results in the next academic year, both in terms of numbers and home universities.

In the area of pedagogical mobility, we started the academic year right at the beginning, when three colleagues from the University of Silesia in Katowice joined us for a month-long research and teaching internship. In the winter semester, we followed up the Erasmus+ programme with a total of eight teaching stays, six training sessions and five monitoring visits of staff from Slovakia and Poland, and a short-term mobility of an assistant professor from Comenius University in Bratislava. In the summer semester, we received three staff members from Polish and Slovak universities for training and four for teaching stays, and two one-month internships of teachers from the University of St. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava and Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan took place under the CEEPUS programme.

Our staff undertook a total of ten training and seven teaching mobilities within the Erasmus+ programme to universities in Slovakia, Poland, Croatia and Norway, where the first visit took place within the newly established cooperation with the Inland University of Norway. In addition, two teachers also travelled to Slovakia and Poland within the framework of CEEPUS. Thanks to the funds from the Strategic Management Support Programme, we were able to financially support the trips of our teachers to the STARS EU partner universities in Albania and France, as well as to Nicolaus Copernicus University of Toruń and the Academy of Applied Sciences Higher School of Management and Administration in Opole. Two other trips were made to public administration institutions in Slovakia and Croatia to discuss the possibility of sending our students on practical traineeships.

In conclusion, we would like to thank all our students and staff who have been involved in the internationalisation activities this academic year and we look forward to continuing our cooperation on long-term projects as well as starting further activities with them and new colleagues in the coming period.