STAY IN: Student guidance at university for inclusion

BRUSSELS – Along a period of two years, the consortium formed by UNIMC – University of Macerata – lead partner, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, University of Seville, MELIUS – International Mobility and Employment, EDEN – European Distance and E-Learning Network, Arcola Research LLP, Lynx s.r.l. and ESU – European Students Union has designed and developed a service  capable of supporting students in higher education during their academic career, by offering guidance and e-guidance to access  available opportunities within the universities and in the communities where the universities are active.

Guidance has been conceived of as personalised support for each student to tackle potential obstacles that lead to disengagement and drop-out. At the end of the project, the results include:

• an integrated guidance and counselling system for universities, covering processes, methods, tools;
• an eGuidance platform  for European universities, designed and developed in order to address the specific needs of higher education institutions and higher education students for of guidance and counselling services, and suitable for supporting on-going guidance and counselling;
• an updated picture of the practices across Europe on guidance for inclusion, and of the student’s point of view on guidance and e-guidance needs during their educational experience.

The initial phase of the project concentrated on carrying out research activities to give an overview on the actual status of the guidance services and the needs for development/improvement. In this regard, the ‘Guidance for inclusion: practices and needs in European Universities’, (April  2013) was produced as one of the main outcomes of the project covering: results of the analysed practices; approaches and features of guidance and counselling services that are potentially transferable to HEI’s; results of the student survey; recommendations for guidance and counselling services.

STAY IN has developed and tested an open-source web-based platform to help students to avoid drop out. The platform is based upon the software called WISP (Web Integrated Services Provider).

The platform was tested in the three partner universities from Italy, Hungary and Spain and a manual for users has been prepared in their languages. More details @ http://stay-in.org/

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For more information, please contact:

Elisabeth Gehrke, ESU Chairperson: +32/479.591.499 // elisabeth@esu-online.org or Robert Hlynur Baldursson, ESU Communications Manager: +32/473.669.894 // robert@esu-online.org