The increased mobility of academic staff is expanding the development of services that support researchers. Some of the solutions can be carried over from practices for foreign students, for whom universities have already developed a wide range of support and facilities. However, researchers often need a different kind of support, especially when traveling with their families.
As part of the UniWeliS Project, coordinated by the Slovak Academic Information Agency, we are creating solutions to help HEIs to create and improve a support system for mobile researchers. With a pleasure we can present an application that collects and describes in detail good practices that facilitate the arrival of researchers, their stay in host units and maintaining contact with them after their departure. The UniWeliS Explorer application tool is a collection of 70 practices in 14 categories. Each of them includes not only a detailed description illustrating how to create a particular type of service, but also specifies the scale of time and financial commitment needed. Each good practice is also accompanied by examples from various European universities where the process has already been implemented. The application can be used as a collection of good ideas that have worked well for others, but can also be used as a tool to improve services that are already operating in specific unit.
"Practitioners dealing with internationalization at the academic level usually have a lot of ideas in their heads about what solutions could help mobility and integration of doctoral students and staff. The application we created as part of the UniWeliS project organizes these ideas, but most importantly, it describes in great detail what elements of the process need to exist for the value of a practice to be greatest. For example, just saying that it's good to hold events that help integrate newly arrived doctoral students or researchers at the university is pretty obvious. But such an event can include more or less elements. We can include in it not only a social dimension, but also a scientific one, and offer administrative support at the same time. How much benefit we will get from a given service depends on the details that will make it up. It is these detailed descriptions that are the great value of the application," says Dr. Zofia Sawicka, deputy director of NAWA.
The next stage of the UniWeliS Project will be the development of universal training courses for the admission of researchers from abroad. This will help overcome the big problem at universities of introducing newcomers to the key issues of internationalizing academic staff. Pilot trainings have already been held in Sofia in early October, and will be organized in Poland and other project countries in spring 2023. A training manual will be created on the basis of the conducted training. NAWA is coordinator of this stage of work in the Project.
