The final conference of the INTERBA project

The final conference of the INTERBA project was held at the University of Tirana on October 12, 2023. The project coordinator thanked all project partners for the successful implementation of the project over the past four years. The main results of the project were presented at the conference.

During the first project year, project partners carried out an analysis of all previous international projects implemented in each country in the field of internationalization. The result was a repository that contained not only an overview of the mechanisms used to encourage internationalization but also provided a gap analysis that opened the door for further and systematic improvement. In this way, it was possible to develop a coherent and unique concept of Internationalisation at Home in all countries to facilitate the understanding and application of the concept in practice. The project also resulted in an online Moodle platform for all partners to support the e-learning process, monitor training, and translate documents.

The programme partner countries trained the core staff during the project through a Train the Trainers (TtT) three-day workshop. Trainees prepared the short pilot courses. These courses were later delivered in the presence of all national PCIs and EU monitoring institutions, including monitoring re-training sessions. The main results of this project are:

• 5 trained persons from each partner higher education institution
• 20-30 staff trained in each partner higher education institution during re-training
• a total of 500 people in the region attended workshops during the project and became part of the network of experts.

INTERBA is an acronym for Erasmus+ CBHE project under the full name of INTERnationalization at Home: Embedding Approaches and Structures to Foster Internationalization at Western Balkans implemented in the period from 2019 to 2023.