Virtual Mobility in Different Learning Contexts

The Covid-19 health crisis had a strong impact on the European and international mobility of young people. When at the beginning of the year 2020 everything came to a standstill, no one could predict for how long. Mobility project organisers had to develop distance activities to enable students to continue their exchanges at European level. It became also one of the main priorities of the Erasmus+ programme, that pedagogical distance activities get combined with mobility periods abroad.

The Erasmus+ programme launched the so-called hybrid mobilities in June 2020, by proposing virtual activities as a complement to physical mobility for skills acquisition. These hybrid mobilities are also included in the new Erasmus+ programme 2021-2027.

While universities and several schools could already build on experience having had organised virtual exchanges for their students before the onset of the Covid-19 crisis, other mobility actors had to renew their pedagogical practices and try out new virtual ways of transnational exchanges.

This section “scenarios” gives an overview of the actual implementation of virtual mobilities in different learning contexts:

• Primary and secondary education
• Vocational training
• Higher Education
• Intercultural programmes