A year full of development, speed and dangerous situations
2021 was a year of development as regards internationality. We built our operation around four continent teams: Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. We look forward to what we can achieve with cooperation.
Continent teams work as hubs of TAMK’s international affairs. The teams deal with both RDI, paid services, student recruitment, mobility and partnerships.
Education export picked up delightfully. We had a new group of Kenyan nursing students. A sunny Brazilian teacher group arrived in Tampere and we educated over 200 teachers online for the Caribbean area. We also educated early childhood education professionals in Asia and continued our double degree programme with China. There were speed and dangerous situations.
The discussions held during the webinars as well as in the assignments given, lend to rich communication among our colleagues from Trinidad and Barbados. It was interesting to note that whether in Finland, Trinidad or Barbados, teachers face the same challenges and while some may have found solutions for these challenges, we were all inspired that we could share our best practices and our views on such.
– Instructional Learning Design for the Distance and Digital Education participant from Trinidad and Tobago
In degree programmes conducted in English, TAMK had applicants from more than 100 countries and the number of applicants continued to grow by 18 %. In the admission process, we still had to balance between the exceptional circumstances and admission criteria. The objective was to ensure equality between applicants and transparency of student admissions.
There were many challenges but also successful new openings in student mobility. Virtual courses for both outgoing and incoming students were introduced. TAMK offered a virtual autumn semester for incoming students. In addition, TAMK offered virtual courses for the international Hague Network partners for the second time. We had plenty of participants from all continents.
The training received has allowed me to acquire the basis to develop myself in the environmental area, propose new initiatives to the educational community, challenges to students. In my school, training led us to empower a group of students as ecological leaders and activists for the planet, an experience that we want to replicate at each level.
– Educators for the Sustainable Future participant from Chile
TAMK’s international partnerships are important for us now and in the future. We started to evaluate the quality of our partnerships. Our motto is that less is more. We also started our application process for the European university network together with seven other European universities. It is exciting.
Text: Carita Prokki, Director, External Funding and Internationalisation & Marjo Korhonen, Head of Student Recruitment Services and Tarja Kalliomäki-Linnas, Head of Study Services
Editing: TAMK’s Communications and Marketing Services
Photo: Saara Lehtonen