Innovation Fund

This project develops innovative and inclusive modules and resources to support students of all backgrounds and abilities throughout their outbound mobility journey.

Student mobility supports in Canada overwhelmingly focus on pre-departure. This project fills this gap by placing equal emphasis on supports available to students during their time abroad and upon re-entry.

Centered on three pillars: the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, best practices in Indigenous education, and in instructional design (UDL), this project ensures student reflection about personal growth and skill acquisition throughout each stage of their global learning journey, providing a holistic learning experience for all participants.

This project aims to offer an inclusive and innovative approach to promoting student physical mobility by designing “high credit value” study abroad programs in which course credit for a single study abroad trip is maximized, thereby addressing two key barriers to participation for historically-underrepresented students: high cost, and delayed time to graduation.

The project will also assess and build on infrastructure that was developed during previous GSO funding, which included creating comprehensive intercultural training, wraparound support services, enhancing the mobility and risk management protocols and policies, and creating internal faculty capacity for COIL course development and delivery.

Quebec’s post-secondary institutions must now comply with the requirements imposed on employers with respect to trainees/interns, even in international settings. This raises various validation-related issues, particularly when it comes to ensuring that all internship/training environments meet these requirements. What if some environments are not in compliance? Will opportunities currently available to students be eliminated?

This project studies the existing legal framework with a view to establishing a risk management process, including a procedure for approving training/internship opportunities outside Canada. Related procedures and tools are tested, validated and improved thanks to the mobility activities undertaken by the consortium members.

Risk is focused on the operational level addressing risks associated with students, partners, activities, and destinations. Overlooked risks at the institutional level including legal, reputational, financial, and operational. Post-secondary institutions can face significant legal challenges; negative impacts to their reputation, repatriation, and emergency expenses; and even injury or death to faculty, staff, and students during crises abroad.

This project helps increasing the capacity of mobility professionals to manage projects, address risk, and respond to emergencies has a direct correlation with the reduction of the risk level faced by post-secondary institutions.

This project leverages Innovation Fund and GSO learning to enable small colleges to scale-up learning abroad.

Through the project, College of the Rockies is formalizing COIL as a sustainable internationalization option and on-ramp to physical mobility. The college works to address the small-college-challenge of scale by developing a course and opportunity abroad that is of widespread interest to students at small colleges. And, the college creates a stronger evidence base by applying the Theory of Planned Behaviour to research complex reasons why students persist in choosing not to study abroad even it is affordable.

Project outcomes is able to be replicated at other small colleges and scale-up learning abroad system-wide.

The “Promoting Inclusive and Visible Mobility” project enhances the visibility of the CEGEP’s mobility projects involving the target groups.

The initial goal is to gain insight into systemic barriers to participation in mobility projects and subsequently to review the CEGEP’s recruitment and awareness strategies.

In so doing, the CEGEP ensures that project-related promotional materials have a significant impact on the target groups. Experimenting with innovative formulas may well boost the number of individuals involved in mobility programs.