In April, Dr Tim Breitbarth, Senior Lecturer in Sport Management, visited Hanzehogeschool Groningen, a Dutch Erasmus partner university of the sports group since 2012.

The extended visit was almost overdue since senior academic Gerco van Dalfsen, who is also the European Association for Sport Management General Secretary, visited Bournemouth in October last year, and is looking forward to another visit to the Southwest as part of the next International Week in October 2013. Also, the first student study exchanges between Bournemouth and Groningen are in the pipeline for the 2013/14 academic year.

The visit mostly revolved around the intensive international student management game hosted at Hanzehogeschool in cooperation with Bournemouth University, Coventry University and German Sport University. Overall, 140 students from 10 countries participated in the 5-day event.

After an application process, Shrehan Lynch (final year sports development), Andrew Imms (final year sports management), Oliver Fulljames and Jack Mogridge (both third year sports management) were selected to represent BU.

In mixed teams of six members, students listened to two major lectures per day and had to complete more than ten group assignments throughout the week. In addition, the students created a fundraising campaign for the university’s currently supported charity, Care4Kenya, and raised about 230 Euros on campus within just one hour. In order to foster informal networking, students also participated in cultural and sporting events.

Dr Breitbarth summarises the added value of such international study and work experiences: “Recently, we have started to add more inbound and outbound internationalisation to our programmes in order to enhance the value of our sport degrees. Shrehan, Andrew, Oliver and Jack benefited from the intercultural teamwork experience and learned much about themselves besides gaining new insights into sport event management issues from a range of international tutors.”

Besides extensive involvement in the management game, Dr Breitbarth discussed experiences with different teaching, learning and assessment formats with international colleagues and forged relationships with local and visiting academics that are expected to prove useful for upcoming conference and publication projects.

Hanzehogeschool is one of The Netherlands most modern university with 25,000 students and state-of-art – even arty – infrastructure, including some impressive sport learning and research facilities.