Measuring University Staff Mobility Impact in Higher Education

Abstract

The paper addresses an issue within the field of higher education that has been discussed since the inception of the Erasmus mobility programme in 1987 - how to properly measure the impact of the staff mobility (academic and administrative). Students have a clear roadmap when it comes to the mobility practice and impact assessment but when it comes to staff mobility, impact assessment is less clear. For academic staff mobility, certain metrics can be used to objectively assess outcomes, but when it comes to the administrative staff, matters become more abstract as there are no widely used common metrics. This paper proposes a tool – the Mobility Matrix, that allows to measure the staff mobility impact using quantitative and qualitative data. The Mobility Matrix offers 10 characteristics of the mobility period that can be assessed at 3 levels for the quantitative part and three text fields for the qualitative part. This tool was tested at Riga Technical University (2023) for the assessment of the staff mobility impact. If the staff member provides credible and accurate data, the Mobility Matrix has the potential to become a common practice in higher education, allowing for new recognition mechanisms of staff mobility to emerge.