
2021|UPORTO
The Complex Trajectories Project focuses on understanding the complex trajectories of students at university and supporting those who navigate them. In the practical domain, the project aims to contribute to the establishment of a system of regular monitoring of student trajectories in order to adjust the development of policies supporting these trajectories at different levels of the system and university institutions. At the conceptual level, the aim is to broaden the notion of what can be considered an inclusive university. While there has been a major movement to look at equity in access to university (known as widening access) the progress of students through the university also requires attention to achieving an inclusive university. To do so, it is also necessary to extend the concept of what is a success in progress through the university. Normally, the analysis of trajectories is done from a single degree program. This gives a restricted view of what a successful trajectory is, since it would only be the one that begins and ends the same degree program. The policies to be applied to promote such success are policies of student retention. Instead, we argue that the focus of the analysis should be the student. Students can shift, pause, combine their studies, move between different degree programs or different modalities (distance and face-to-face), maybe building a complex, but successful, trajectory. Universities can contribute to complex trajectories being more likely to end successfully. To achieve these objectives, the agents involved must be diverse. Basically, the agents working at the level of providing information and understanding the phenomenon, those making policy (at different levels) and those providing direct support to students. Given that the involvement of agents acting at various levels is required and, besides, that the process of information gathering, trajectory analysis and policy adjustment in support of these trajectories needs to be updated, it seems clear that the best way to address the issue is through the networking of the agents involved. The project has three main parts, plus an area dedicated to dissemination, which includes the objective of generating or consolidating a network in each territory of the consortium partners. The first part is where we aim to end up developing a methodology for analysing student trajectories that is transferable to other higher education contexts. To achieve this result, we first try to understand and compare the trajectories of students in the diversity of universities we analyse. We focus our attention on complex trajectories, especially those that transit from one face-to-face institution (or program) to another at a distance (or vice versa), and in the disadvantaged profiles (by reason of social origin, migrant background, geographical
2021|UPORTO