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In the context of Italian higher education increasingly oriented toward internationalization, the TNE LEGO project (“Italy-East Asia Cooperation: from Local Expertise to a Global Outlook”) is taking on a leading role. The term “TNE” stands for Transnational Education, meaning an education that transcends national borders, and in this case involves Italian universities and universities in East Asia.

On the one hand, LEGO fits into the logic of “internationalization” that is essential for Italian universities, which aim to enhance their attractiveness and educational quality in a global context. On the other hand, the focus on East Asia (a rapidly growing educational market) opens new avenues for dialogue, research, and exchange.

Among the challenges identified are: ensuring that mobility opportunities are truly accessible to all students, overcoming linguistic and cultural barriers, and guaranteeing the sustainability of the partnership even beyond the end of its funding. The project’s institutional documents highlight sustainability and replicability as key objectives.

Participation in a project like LEGO allows:

• Students to acquire intercultural and linguistic skills, developing “an international profile”
• Faculty to experiment with joint teaching methods, engage in international collaborations, and strengthen the network between Italian and Asian universities
• Universities to increase their internationalization, create double-degree programs, and reinforce global cooperation

The TNE LEGO project therefore represents a significant milestone in the broader strategy of internationalization within the Italian university system.

LEGO was created with a very concrete goal: to strengthen cooperation between Italian universities and East Asian institutions through international mobility, enhancing the excellence of each partner and bringing them into synergy. In this project, mobility is not “a trip,” but a way to build stable ties, shared languages, and collaborations that continue even after returning home.

The core of the consortium’s work has been to transform opportunities and practices – often fragmented – into a more readable and replicable system: those who depart must know what to expect, and those who host must be able to work with clear and shared tools. For this reason, LEGO invested in a comparative mapping of mobility instruments (students, faculty, and administrative staff), with the aim of identifying best practices and circulating them within the network, without burdening the experience of applicants or those managing the flows.

Another important step forward has been to give continuity to relations with Asia not only through individual exchanges, but through a “project infrastructure” that supports mobility throughout the entire cycle: preparation, implementation, bilateral traceability, and valorization of results. In this perspective, each mobility becomes an investment that opens new collaborations, fuels shared research interests, and makes it easier to design future educational initiatives within a network already rich in relationships.

The LEGO project works to ensure that international mobility is a formative experience “that lasts”: not just a period abroad, but a step capable of strengthening disciplinary, linguistic, and intercultural skills, while creating lasting connections between students and academic communities in East Asia. This is one of the project’s central levers: opening new trajectories for today’s students and making the link between universities and territories, in Italy and Asia, more solid.

The consortium’s activities show a strong emphasis on student mobility, particularly outbound, with experiences designed to dialogue with study programs and with the project’s thematic areas: Languages and Cultures, Science and Technology for Sustainability, and Management and Economics for Society. The direction is clear: mobility should not be “extra,” but a coherent part of the curriculum and an accelerator of transferable skills.

Behind the scenes, significant work has been done to make opportunities comparable and “communicable”: through shared monitoring, the consortium collected homogeneous information on calls, selections, and actual mobilities, integrating quantitative data with qualitative insights. In practice, this means learning how to improve access to opportunities, how to make them clearer for applicants, and how to increase the overall impact of experiences, turning evidence and results into operational guidelines.

On the quantitative side, monitoring confirms the centrality of students: among mobilities already reported as completed, there are over 100 outbound student mobilities and more than 20 inbound (minimum values reconstructed from evidence collected during ongoing monitoring), indicating strong outbound dynamics and room for growth to make flows increasingly reciprocal and balanced over time.

From 20 to 24 October 2025, a training course for teachers of Italian as a foreign language was held at Nanjing Normal University, involving participants from universities in People’s Republic of China, Japan, and Vietnam within the framework of the TNE-LEGO project.

The activity was part of the Advanced Skills action of TNE, designed to support the development of advanced training programs for teaching staff, administrative staff, and researchers. It was coordinated by Professor Graziano Serragiotto of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

The seminars, delivered by Dr. Silvia Scolaro of Ca’ Foscari, covered both general topics – such as the fundamentals of language teaching and the history of language education – and more specific approaches, including Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) and Action Research. Activities aimed at fostering motivation among language learners, linked to metacognitive strategies and techniques, were also addressed.

The initiative foresees a second training event in Venice from 23 to 27 February 2026, involving the same participants as the first.

Thanks to this experience, Ca’ Foscari has been able to strengthen existing partnerships, particularly with Nanjing Normal University, while also initiating new collaborations with other partner institutions. These collaborations are expected to foster further exchanges of faculty and students, promoting mutual enrichment and learning.

Programme 20-24/10/2025 [ITA]

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LEGO also promotes mobility in its most transformative dimension: that which involves faculty and enables the growth of teaching and scientific cooperation with East Asia. In this perspective, mobility becomes a laboratory: an opportunity to experiment with methods, co-design content, initiate collaborations, and bring back to the home university practices that can generate new opportunities for students and research groups.

The consortium’s action focuses on the quality of collaboration over time: selectivity, reciprocity, and sustainability are not abstract words, but criteria that help ensure that exchanges produce results. When faculty mobility is well connected to educational and scientific objectives, its impact “multiplies”: it can strengthen an existing partnership, open new shared research interests, and create continuity among those who teach, those who study, and those who support internationalization.

One element LEGO is emphasizing is the sharing of methodologies and resources among consortium universities, so that experiences do not remain isolated. This approach helps make cooperation less dependent on individuals and more solid as a network, because what works in one context can be adapted and reused elsewhere. This is exactly how ties with Asia are strengthened: through relationships that become working habits and build trust, year after year.

Numbers also describe this “targeted” nature: monitoring of reported mobilities shows faculty flows more selective than student ones, but still present.

When we talk about mobility, we often only see departures. LEGO is also working on what makes departures possible and sustainable: the consortium’s ability to design, manage, and improve flows over time, circulating operational skills and consolidating relationships with already active and reliable Asian partners. In this framework, the training and involvement of offices and technical-administrative staff are fundamental, because they make internationalization more accessible and less “dependent on individuals.”

An important point, to avoid misunderstandings: in monitoring, compared to the categories of students and faculty, fewer activities are recorded as “administrative staff mobility” than might be expected. At the same time, the report shows that there are missions and work visits attributable to staff contributions, which have concrete value because they support LEGO’s overall goal: making Italy-Asia cooperation more stable, more effective, and easier to manage on a daily basis. In this perspective, making the distinction between formalized mobilities and support missions even clearer and more uniform will help fully represent staff commitment and foster new dedicated training opportunities.

On the statistical front, the report’s dataset is broad and comparable: it includes 117 documents collected through surveys (from all consortium partners) and systematic acquisition. Within the corpus, 27 mobility calls/notices and related support documents are recorded, confirming a structure that emphasizes traceability, procedural clarity, and the solidity of international cooperation.

The underlying idea remains simple: when offices and staff have access to a partnership already rich in relationships and a shared heritage of methods and tools, the entire network works better. Reception and the quality of the experience for incoming participants improve, support for outgoing participants improves, and the consortium’s ability to build Italy-Asia collaborations that do not end with a single call is strengthened.

Double/Joint Degrees are among the most ambitious horizons of the LEGO project because they represent “high-intensity” cooperation: not just mobility, but programs in which universities from different countries share teaching design, mutual credit recognition, and collaboration that tends to stabilize in the long term. In this logic, mobility ceases to be an addition and becomes an integral part of the educational path, increasing the attractiveness and solidity of Italy-Asia partnerships.

The “DJD-oriented” reading of calls has been a key step in the work carried out: it serves to evaluate not only selection or requirements, but above all the ability to make institutional relations lasting, with bilateral traceability and verifiable quality. It is a change of scale: from individual exchanges to a structure that integrates teaching, mobility, coordination, and continuity over time.

Here too, numbers help to understand the direction, without needing to mention individual universities. In the DJD channel, monitoring reports one case with 20 incoming students already hosted within a double degree program and another case with 26 mobilities carried out in the DJD framework (a numerically significant package in this channel). DJD mobilities currently in progress are also reported (for example, 2 outgoing and 4 incoming on the student side) as well as situations in which mobilities are accompanied by academic missions linked to the DJD context (for example, 3 outgoing faculty mobilities together with 3 missions). Overall, internal reports describe a “targeted” use of DJD: very significant in some cases, not yet activated or recorded in others, with clear potential for growth and consolidation.