Strategic partnership continues and strengthens between TAMK and MUAS
The first partnership agreement made in 2013 agreed on double degrees in the business administration programmes. The double degree means that students can complete a foreign degree in addition to the bachelor’s degree of their own country and receive two degree certificates upon graduation.
The meeting in Tampere on 22-23 November was very concrete and target-oriented as in addition to MUAS management several professors arrived to strengthen development cooperation in their competence fields. During the past five years the universities of applied sciences have found their joint competences and interests and related development will continue. Professionals of the competence fields gather annually to prepare joint concrete activities and thus teachers of the fields can also affect the cooperation.
Eleven students have studied in the double degree in international business so far. Different fields of education have cooperation projects which develop for example virtuality workshops and forums. The workshops include low-threshold digital exercises which respond to digital competence challenges. A joint project of the technical field focuses on heat pumps, heat recovery systems and almost zero-energy building.
Mobility is a part of the partnership programme. Approximately 150 short staff, student and teacher exchanges have been implemented during the past years.
- We at TAMK want to welcome MUAS staff members to work here for short or longer periods to increase our home internationalisation. MUAS wants to have TAMK teachers to run summer studies in Munich next summer, tells HR Director Merja Jortikka.
Joint summer schools for international students will be organised in the years to come.
Towards digitalisation and sharing of good practices
During the two-day visit strengthening of cooperation was discussed in digitalisation and development of web-based learning environments. In future, one concrete form may be online studies.
The universities of applied sciences have benchmarked each others’ international activities and support services and had new ideas for organisation of operations. The Degree Programmes in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology have found joint strengths and their development cooperation will deepen.
Double degrees interest and the possibilities of extending them to other degree programmes are being established. MUAS is preparing health and nursing degree programmes as its new competence field and TAMK has strong expertise to offer for the preparation and implementation.
New cooperation parties and partners are searched for research and development to strengthen the competences of MUAS and TAMK. The more extensive Finnish-German network cooperation aims at having more research projects through different country-specific and international funding channels.
International network reaches 50 countries
TAMK’s international cooperation network consists of 350 higher education institutions in 50 countries. Approximately 350 TAMK students participate in long international student exchanges annually and another 400 in short exchanges. About 300 exchange students come to TAMK for a long student exchange and equally many for a short exchange. The number of outgoing teachers and staff is about 400 annually and number of incoming teachers and staff about the same.
In addition to MUAS, TAMK has strategic partnership agreements with two Dutch universities of applied sciences, Hanze University of Applied Sciences and The Hague University of Applied Sciences.
