Erasmus+ Politika Beyanı

Our institution attaches importance to make various qualified exchange agreements for students and staff mobility. Since our language of instruction is English, it is an advantage for the incoming students and staff. Besides, due to ECTS and DS label awards, it is thought that internationalization will be affected positively.

To sign fruitful agreements Preparatory Visits have been made to higher education institutions and also attended to international conferences relevant to Erasmus. The agreement drafts firstly proposed by host institutions have been forwarded to the departments for their checking and approval. Some of the academic staff would like to make agreements with the host institutions who have connections built in international academic congresses and conferences. Some of the departments prefer to make web search to investigate the high quality higher education institutions. In order to support non-academic staff, Office of International Relations (IRO) searches the places in which our staff can make an efficient exchange.

We would like to increase the variety of the exchange countries as a policy. Our criteria is to find institutions compatible with our academic units. Our departments are mostly science and engineering based. Therefore, we focus on searching universities which have strong technical departments. In the light of this criteria, our institute is open to all geographical areas. Due to Erasmus programme, we have many agreements with European Union HEIs. For this reason, our intend is to balance the agreements made with higher education institutions from different areas especially the regions that we did not make any agreement before.

We try to increase the number of study mobility students from each department in a balanced way. We would like to encourage students for placement purposes to ensure them to benefit a real market experience. The other Erasmus activity which would like to be disseminated at our Institute is Erasmus Staff Mobility for Training and invited staff from Enterprises both to provide our staff an observing chance of the different applications in their working area and to give chance to the students who has not participated Erasmus programme to listen courses from different lecturers especially coming from enterprises. We give special importance to disseminate the exchange of non-academic staff. The aim is to give a possibility to all staff to make an observation and comparison about the differences in administrative procedures, systems. Since the first cycle students show big interest to study mobility, in new periods our target is to catch the same interest for the traineeship students in first cycle students and study mobility in second and third cycle students, increase teaching staff mobility and then staff mobility for non-academic staff.

The Rectorship highly support double/multiple/joint degrees and settled an easy procedure to help and direct the academic staff who would like to initiate the procedure with the host institutions. Some of our faculty members who participated in the Erasmus Teaching Staff Mobility Programme have an intension of maintaining scientific cooperation with the host institutions including double diploma programmes and joint project applications.

As our Institution policy, cooperation projects which will be efficient and its results may enable sustainable further cooperation has been supported and in order to encourage, some short-cuts has been made in the bureaucratic part of the procedure regarding our institute. For research based cooperation projects, Project Office of the Institute has been helpful, while Office of International Relations has been active for other type of cooperation projects. Both of the Offices aim at taking care of the administrative procedures so that the potential beneficiaries may have enough time to deal with the technical details of the cooperation project.

Erasmus mobility actions helped our institute to understand and apply ECTS system. NonErasmus students also benefited ECTS system and the advantages of diploma supplement for their international degree applications to European HEIs. Besides, by the invited personnel in the framework of teaching staff mobility, non-Erasmus students find a possibility to listen courses from different professors and professionals. According to our observations, after Erasmus Programme, the number of graduate students who prefer Europe for their further academic carriers increased so the programme helped to decrease the brain drain to outside of Europe. According to the activity reports filled by our Erasmus beneficiaries, the outcomes they gain can be summarized as making observations and comparison in teaching methodology, thesis conduction in Master and Doctoral Programmes, laboratory management, administrative procedures, time and work management, theoretical and practical work load of the similar courses, cultural habits. It is expected that returning beneficiaries will carry out the applications they interiorized at the host institution in their future academic or administrative lives. All mobility students and staff make a significant contribution for the presentation of our institute abroad. Our successful traineeship students provided attention on our institute by enabling that host supervisors would like to contact with our institute for more comprehensive cooperation. We give big importance to traineeship mobility due that students makes their internship in research centers and enterprises learn lots of thing about their job which enables the transfer of knowledge which means the regional development. Since we have many interdisciplinary graduate programmes, the teaching staff has a chance to evaluate the mechanisms of interdisciplinary programmes at different HEIs. Some nonteaching staff reported that in the trainings they learned some techniques in the field of their job in a very detailed way so that their visit attained its target. Teaching staff who participated the programme reported that most of them made studies for the physical facilities, installation of the laboratories and research centers of the host institutes and have intended to make a serious collaborations in the future with their international colleagues, mostly on joint degrees and research funded projects. In Turkish Higher Education system the number of exchange programmes were increased inspired by Erasmus Programme for example, Farabi Programme (exchange within Turkish HEIs), Mevlana Programme (exchange between Turkish HEIS and the non-EU countries). In addition to that, TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) has increased the grant support for the mobility of the researchers. For this reason, our institute directly influenced by the variety of these exchange programmes inspired by Erasmus Programme.