Virtual mobility aims at enriching Higher Education through facilitating exchanges and collaboration among students across institutional and country borders (Erasmus+ programme guide, 2018). Generally speaking, virtual mobility programmes are designed and offered by universities specifically for the purpose of organizing online learning experiences for those students who do not use physical mobility opportunities. By means of virtual mobility students can enrich their curricula with courses and other learning activities in higher education in other countries. They can do it online, using digital tools and online systems and yet in intensive interaction with learners from different universities, different cultures and contexts. By participating in virtual mobility programmes students get a chance to develop skills and competences that are not normally included in educational programmes, such as intercultural or networking skills.

This article reflects on a joint development and implementation of an international online course in educational design by teams from University of Jyväskylä, Finland, Open University of the Netherlands and FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany. In this project, students of three different study programmes in Educational Science collaboratively developed a mobile learning scenario based on theories and models of educational design and realized this design in a mobile learning application. In small international groups of maximum five students, an initial idea on an educational media product was conceived and afterwards, the theoretical foundation, design, implementation and evaluation were developed in iterative cycles. The course ended with a final online presentation, evaluating the results.