In this page you will find the projects we are working on.
C-Extended ▼
The main priority of the C-Extended project emphasises the crucial role of Higher Education Institutions in boosting innovation, with an approach deeply rooted in the principle of partnership and with a novel focus on interdisciplinary and intersectoral education.
The project was created in order to outlines the strong need to bridge the lack of intersectoral dialogue and collaboration between the academic and the business sector, boosted reflection on the goals of innovation that is mobility across scientific disciplines and strengthening of higher education regionally.
Main activities:
1. Participation of students to learning activities in interdisciplinary modules during standard Erasmus+ mobility scheme at participating higher educational insitutes (host universities). The mobility will be enhanced with a set of interdisciplinary courses (with pre-approved mutual recognition) specific for each combination of home-host institution.
2. Participation of students to learning activities in their home universities exploiting extended blended learning approaches for the newly developed interdisciplinary modules before and after the physical mobility to enhance their skills acquisition and competences evaluation.
3. Participation of students to training intersectoral activities using the C-Extended mobility funding for up to 2 months to involve the students in an interdisciplinary and intersectoral placement in an organization (business, social enterprise) embedded in the local ecosystem of host universities.
More details in the dedicated project page -> C-Extended Project
OpenU ▼
OpenU project
The Erasmus+ KA3 project “Online Pedagogical Resources for European Universities” (OpenU) addresses the EU Commission priority to foster excellence, innovation and inclusion in higher education by creating a European digital hub, called BLOOM, that provides the digital infrastructure for higher education policy experimentation.
Launched in February 2019, the OpenU project brings together representatives of ten European higher education institutions, six ministries of higher education and research, (France, Germany, Belgium, Latvia, Portugal, Spain), and four European networks around the topic of digitalisation in higher education.
The project’s objective is to contribute to the emergence of innovative policies, encourage mutual learning and strengthen long-term strategic and structural cooperation between European higher education institutions.
Innovating higher education in the era of digital transformation
OpenU attaches great importance and value to the objective of fostering international cooperation and exchange between HEIs in Europe. It supports the development of European university alliances and the transferability of innovative practices.
Through OpenU, academic staff will be able to leverage on digital infrastructure for curricular cooperation initiatives and for setting up joint learning activities in which their students can be directly involved. Results of the project will enable exchange of experiences and good practices in digital education and analysis of their impact. They will be used to develop and support close-knit cooperation amongst Higher Education Institutions and impact also on institutional and EU policy.
Bringing researchers, practitioners and policymakers together
OpenU involves both HEIs and national high-level policy-making authorities in its work to implement the hub along with the evaluation of several rounds of pedagogical experimentation with the hub. This experimentation is based on projects carried out by the administrative and teaching staff of European universities in innovative practices such as online collaboration, joint degrees, new mobility formats, virtual learning and digitalized environment.
The agile approach that is mobilised in the framework of the project will allow evolving needs, definitions and feedback from practitioners, researchers and policymakers to be integrated throughout the project lifetime.
More details in the project page -> OpenU project
Portfolio Erasmus ▼
One of the most significant challenges to reach “digital transformation” in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) is the lack of defined strategies, low capacities and organizational change barriers. In this context, the PORTFOLIO consortium has identified a set of crucial needs involving HEIs (partner and potential institutions), students and teachers.
At a level of HEIs partners, we found that there is little institutional capacity to reach digital transformation, i.e., know-how to develop innovative learning and teaching activities through digital systems. The scarcity of guidelines has redounded in a lack of methodologies to design and implement the necessary institutional structures, such as standardization evaluation process, in terms of deliverables; automatic recognition systems of students’ learning outcomes, when dealing with interconnected education activities; and credits (such as ECTS) recognition systems, when dealing with micro-courses across universities.
Indeed, regarding this later point, there is limited knowledge concerning the use of micro-courses linked to ECTS and future micro-credential systems. The scarcity of guidelines and the impossibility of implementing digital transformation have a relevant impact, for students and teachers.
In the case of students, European HEIs often have limited inter-connected educational programs at European level offering effective virtual mobility, preventing learners from developing social and intercultural competences and critical thinking.
As for teachers, the low levels of digital transformation have redounded in a deficit of innovative tools, preventing teachers and training experts from joining distributed teams and engaging with inter-connected teaching methods and practices at the inter-university micro-course level.
To satisfy the needs of HEIs, students and teachers, the PORTFOLIO project aims at designing and implementing a distributed and blended European Entrepreneurship Minor (Distributed Minor), whose blended execution and iterative testing will allow us to develop a Framework and concrete tools for implementing innovative teaching and learning practices.
As for the framework, this will consist in a series of guidelines for HEIs and teachers that will offer support in: implementing an agreement for the automatic recognition of student’s learning outcomes across universities at a microcourse level (e.g., through existing ECTS); implementing a standardization evaluation process (at a European minor level and at a micro-course level); applying a common quality control process to measure students’ satisfaction regarding interconnected educational activities; providing teachers with knowledge and know-how about working with distributed and blended education at a micro course level; and, last but not least, developing knowledge and know-how concerning the creation and management of inter-university pedagogical teams.
In the case of the concrete tool, the PORTFOLIO will provide partners and potential HEIs with a “minor toolkit”, i.e., a mock-up with the building blocks for inter-connected education, including standardized deliverables, use of micro-courses linked to ECTS (and micro-credentials) at the interuniversity level, automatic recognition of students’ learning outcomes, quality control processes and other relevant functionalities to handle the distributed minor.