NAFSA 2009

From 24-29 May 2009, Peter Vanhee (Youth Agora) attended the annual NAFSA conference representing the European Campus Consortium. This 5-day conference focused on study abroad in the USA and worldwide. With over 7000 people present at the conference, it was clear that study abroad is an important theme in the USA and worldwide, and its momentum is only increasing. A couple of sessions will be highlighted, however the entire conference was very interesting. 

In the "Breaking Barriers" session, a group of former study abroad students spoke about their stories before and after their experiences. A team from San Francisco State University did a great job in capturing the subtleties of study abroad, and a part of the movie can be seen online at YouTube.

"The changing technology landscape in education abroad" was another interesting session talking about the new hypes in technology and internet communication, and how study abroad offices could adapt tools such as Facebook or Twitter to better reach their students. "Crowdsourcing" is becoming a new hype: let your students tell their stories about the study abroad experiences and your educational programmes. Student blog aggregation is often used by universities to get a grasp of the atmosphere around study abroad. Interestingly, this is very similar to our approach in the European Campus project for integrating non-formal information in the Master Template. "Virality" was the other term coined in the session, explaining that study abroad is inherently viral: if successful, students will automatically motivate their peers to go on study abroad, and the role of the international offices would be to give students the opportunity to expose virality. Check out the presentation here. 

Finally, our poster presentation of the European Campus was very successful. Many chats about the project and the relation with e-learning, media dissemination and so on were available. As a conclusion, we could say that our project can enhance the attractiveness of study abroad in Europe, and we are looking forward to attending the next NAFSA conference in Kansas!