The Learning Agreement

A learning agreement lists the courses you’ll take at your host institution and pairs them, credit for credit, against the courses they replace at home. It only becomes valid once three parties sign it: you, your sending institution, and your receiving institution, and that has to happen before your mobility starts. Once it’s signed, recognition stops being a negotiation. Pass the agreed courses abroad, get the agreed credits at home, automatically.

Since this is probably the first time you will need to ask for a Learning Agreement, it is crucial to understand the correct step by step procedure to follow if you want to get this really important document right. Discover it with us!

Before contacting anyone, browse host institutions and note specific courses that interest you, ideally by exact course title or code and its ECTS value. Nothing here is formal yet. This is just so you walk into the next step with a real proposal instead of a blank page.

Submit your application through your home international office if you’re on an organized exchange, or independently if you’re a free mover, then wait for admission. Nothing in the learning agreement can be finalized until this is confirmed.

What’s the timeline here? For Erasmus and Exchange, you will need to wait for the final day of admission decision. For free movers, usually admission is rolling basis, and with us you have a preferential channel of highly-responsive partner institutions, so admission can come also after a few business days.

After you get the admission letter, find out who at your home faculty actually signs learning agreements. This is usually a mobility or Erasmus coordinator, sometimes a subject-specific academic advisor rather than the general international office. Tell them that you just received an admission for a semester abroad at that university.

If you’re going through Erasmus or a bilateral exchange, there may be a nomination step to confirm your place first. If you’re a free mover, there’s no quota to clear, but your coordinator may simply be less familiar with the process, so surfacing it early avoids headaches close to departure.

A very important note before starting all of this: please have already in mind which courses you would like to take at the host institution, and which courses these are going to replace at your home institution for your semester of absence. Why? Being already admitted at a foreign institution + having a clear course plan simplifies drastically the job of your home university coordinator in assisting you drafting your Learning Agreement. It’s also a sign of seriousness about the chosen destination and academic offering. You’re not just saying:”I want to go abroad for a semester”; you’re actively telling them where and why, with a precise action plan, admission letter secured, and available course offering checked.

As mentioned in the previous step, you should already have an idea of which courses to follow during your semester abroad. If not, please scan thoroughly the academic offering of the destination you’ve been admitted to before proceeding.

Then, it’s time to start drafting the Learning Agreement, which is actually a set of two tables:

• One table lists the courses you’ll take at the host institution.
• A second lists the courses at home they’re replacing, matched credit for credit, usually in ECTS.

Build this with your home coordinator, not alone, since they’re the one certifying the pairing makes academic sense.

Once your home coordinator approves the pairing and your host institution confirms the courses are actually available to you, all three parties sign: you, your sending institution, your receiving institution. Do this before you leave. Once it’s signed, nothing about recognition is left open anymore.

One month before leaving, time has passed since your original shortlist, and course catalogs shift between when you first looked and when you actually enroll. Confirm with the host institution that the specific courses you want are still running that semester, still have room, and still sit at the level you need, before you jump on the plane and start your semester overseas.

That said, even if something changes while you are abroad in terms of academic content (sometimes it happens, as universities can change their academic offering even after the year has started), you still have the chance to adjust your Learning Agreement.

Timetables clash, professors go on leave, and a course you built your agreement around simply isn’t offered that semester. This is common enough that every learning agreement includes a section for changes made during the mobility. You typically get the first few weeks of the semester abroad to request and finalize them, though the exact deadline is set by the agreement between your two universities rather than one universal rule, so confirm the actual date with your coordinator instead of assuming one. There’s no credit-size exemption either: a one-course swap needs the same three-party agreement as a full rebuild, though many institutions now accept that agreement by email instead of demanding a fresh physical signature.

Once your courses abroad are finished and graded, your host institution sends a Transcript of Records to both you and your home institution, typically within a few weeks of your results being finalized. Your home institution converts those results using the learning agreement you signed at the start, not a fresh review, just the agreement already on file. Translating your actual grades between two different grading scales is a separate step, which is why grade and credit conversion tables exist as their own resource.

The European Commission does publish an official “Learning Agreement for Studies” template, maintained under the Erasmus+ program and increasingly exchanged digitally between universities. So the document is standardized at the policy level. In practice, you’ll rarely see that raw template, your home university runs it through its own system, sometimes a fully digital platform, sometimes a document you fill in and email around. If your mobility isn’t under Erasmus+ at all, there’s usually no obligation to use the EU version, and universities issue their own equivalent instead. The function is identical. The paperwork underneath it is not. Thus, you can freely use it for free mover mobility or bilateral exchange.

Everything above applies across Erasmus+, bilateral agreements, and independent free mover placements alike. The process is the same. What changes is the support around it: Erasmus students usually have an international office walking them through each step, while free movers navigate the same process on their own. If that’s you, how credit recognition works end to end and why this isn’t just an Erasmus thing are worth a read before you start step one.