MEASURING UNIVERSITY STAFF MOBILITY IMPACT USING MOBILITY MATRIX

MEASURING UNIVERSITY STAFF MOBILITY IMPACT USING MOBILITY MATRIX
Karlis Valtins, Riga Technical University, International Education Research Center, Latvia / Zane Emilija Sarma, Riga Technical University, International Education Research Center, Latvia

(Presented at the International Conference on Research in Education and Science (ICRES) which took place on April 27-30, 2024, in Antalya, TURKEY (https://www.2024.icres.net/) and at the International Conference on Education in Mathematics, Science and Technology (ICEMST) (https://www.2024.icemst.com/) organized by the International Society for Technology, Education and Science (ISTES) http://www.istes.org).

Paper addresses an issue within the field of higher education that has been discussed since inception of Erasmus mobility programme in 1987 - how to properly measure impact of the staff mobility (both academic and administrative). Students have a clear roadmap when it comes to the mobility practice and impact assessment, they need to establish combability of study plan and courses between sending and hosting institutions, reach certain amount of credit points, they receive a transcript of records upon the end of the mobility period. But when it comes to the staff mobility, there is mobility agreement that contains mobility programme, but impact assessments are typically aligned with home university practices. In academic staff mobility there are certain metrics that can be used to objectively assess the outcomes, for example number of teaching hours (which does not fully allow to measure the mobility impact), but when it comes to the administrative staff things are even more abstract as there are no widely used common metrics. This paper proposes a tool - mobility matrix that allows to measure staff mobility impact using quantitative and qualitative data. Mobility matrix offers 10 characteristics of mobility period that can be assessed in 3 levels for the quantitative part, but for qualitative part there are three text fields that correspond to the experience during the mobility. This tool has been tested in Riga Technical University (2023) for staff mobility and has proven to be easy to use, easy to understand, time effective and representative for the assessment of the staff mobility impact. If the staff member after the mobility period provides credible and accurate data, mobility matrix has the potential to become a common practice in higher education, allowing for new recognition mechanisms of staff mobility to emerge.