Successful UNICAC Workshops With LAUREA And Uzbekistan Universities

Laurea UAS, TUIT and NUUz organized three half-day virtual workshops in June 2021. The objective was to provide a co-creation workshop for academics and local business partners and share and develop concrete and creative tools for internationalization. Also the aim was to create next steps for internationalization on organizational and personal level. Workshops included some lectures and notes, which were then concretized in virtual breakout rooms.

Workshops were built so that they started from the high level and ended up in an individual level. In the first session the theme was the big picture, including topics like the Finnish Education system, international activities metrics & monitoring, and the current state and strategy of internationalization for the participating universities.

In the second workshop we took one step closer to the conretism. We started on how to build Enablers of Internationalization, giving good examples and practical advice from Laurea to be benchmarked and applied by the Uzbek universities. In that part we handled issues like International cooperation through Double Degree programmes and Student&Staff – Exchange&Teaching through international cooperation. On top of these we went through other practical ways of international networking and cooperating. Also, we pointed out some key issues in the Best Practices Manual, collected within the UNICAC project consortium. At the end of the workshop we activate the participants to focus on the competencies graduates need in their careers. KEY QUESTION: What added value of universitys internationalization can bring to students (future) working life competencies?  

On the last workshop, under the theme innovative Pedagogy Enhancing, we went through basics of Intercultural Communication. Using Hofstede Country Comparison we evaluated possible culture related problems between Finland, Uzbekistan and other countries in our internationalization scope. The second big topic was Laurea`s action model Learning by Developing and introducing its applications in international cases in reality.

We started the series of workshops from the big picture with a large timeframe, and we ended it in individual level with very short timeframe: Tomorrow, when you go to work, what concrete steps will YOU take towards internationalization?