Educational in a global environment: non-formal examples of learning practices at the international office

23rd SPACE AGM and Conference from 9 to 12 May 2012 Conference theme: The Role of Professional Higher Education: Responsibility and Reflection Venue: Mikkeli University of Applied Sciences, Mikkeli, Finland

Such output demands a very effective and complex process, involves several actors and environments and can be more or less formal. Traditionally, education has been divided into 3 main types - formal, non-formal and informal – and each of them has been defined and contextualized in different ways by several researchers. Nevertheless, in the process of education of students of the knowledge society of 21st century, the three types overlap quite often and play different roles in the process of lifelong learning. This paper aims at presenting some environments of non-formal education, in a formal Higher Education Institution (HEI), in which undergraduated students from different programs and semesters can acquire crucial skills and knowledge on intercultural and interpersonal relations, entrepreneurship and other. The non-formal environment examples are deeply linked to the management of international students’ mobility by the International Office of a HEI, which greatly depends on the cooperation of in-house students in a non-formal learning context. Being the Bologna Diplomas mainly a 6-semester education program, in some cases with no placement embedded, students are more and more looking for opportunities to acquire more and more context-based knowledge and skills to help them feel prepared for the global society. In fact, Higher Education can become a fundamental (non)formal ground in which young people get a hold of skills and knowledge complementary to and/ or applied from the formal education in classes, which is needed to understand global problems and also important for their personal development.