Academic trips in higher education: identifying trends through a systematic literature review

Abstract

[EN] Objectives: Higher education institutions have a mission to train and equip tomorrow¿s leaders with a comprehensive set of skills they can use anywhere in the world. For example, the creation of the Erasmus Programme in Europe became a driving force for study mobility among university students. At the same time, many institutions have also organised academic trips to give students more specialised experiences that complement the knowledge provided in the classroom and open up new environments for cultural immersion. However, despite the existence of studies on this aspect, the diverse objectives of these trips and the use of different terminology to describe them in published research make it difficult to identify them and group them together. The aim of this paper is to present a literature overview of academic trips as a learning tool in higher education. Methodology: The methodology was based on a systematic analysis of the literature, carried out using the Web of Science (WoS) search engine. For this purpose, specific search criteria were employed using various keywords related to academic trips, enabling the construction of a solid corpus of relevant studies. Results: The results of the corpus analysis revealed that works on academic travel experiences in higher education are fragmented given their remarkable terminological diversity, thus making it very difficult for stakeholders to identify them. Most of the papers found belong to the teaching and STEM disciplines, while other papers that have reported interesting findings have gone unnoticed.