European Reform University Alliance – ERUA

ERUA’s first field of action is about building a flexible and participatory alliance, inviting all members of the universities’ communities to contribute to its development.

The global coordination team of the project is thus committed to:

• Create a transparent and engaging governing structure which will unite students, teachers and staff and facilitate the exchange between them
• Establish transparent and rigorous procedures for administration and financial management that will go beyond the structural differences of the partner institutions
• Regular monitoring of alliance activities for continuous improvement

ERUA also intends to conceive a common quality standards system to ensure the accountability, reproducibility, sustainability, quality of activities and their conformity with ethical, gender- and inclusion-related requirements. The Alliance will thus ensure the quality, alignment and consistency of all its educational initiatives while providing feedback on pedagogical practices among partners.

Goals:

The purpose of this work package is to ensure that European reform universities remain venues of experimentation. We aim to question what universities are and to re-imagine what they could be. We will promote experimentation in teaching, learning, and research within the Alliance. We will gather information about what is already happening, support and share new experiments, and offer recommendations for how we can move forward into the future.

Measures:

• Gathering and sharing of information
• Establishment of an open database with innovative cases
• Support for experiments in teaching and learning
• Training workshops for younger academics who want to engage in new, collaborative, and interdisciplinary forms of research
• Research workshops discussing the role of higher education and research in the modern world

As Reform universities, we are dedicated to offer the most innovative learning offer to all our ERUA students.

ERUA’s third field of action is focused on building a new ecosystem within the alliance by combining our respective teaching offer and the successful experiments conducted by the ERUA’s working group on “Re-imagining Higher Education and Research”. All our activities are developed through an innovative integrated framework thanks to the active participation of all the ERUA team from all member universities.

Re-imagining learning pathways engages us to:

• Develop a common conceptual and digital approach to education and research
•  Develop a deep disciplinary knowledge and foster interdisciplinarity
• Enable students to design their own learning pathways through uniquely flexible combinations of courses

We foster experience-based learning through civic engagement, critical thinking and interdisciplinarity. Our activities involve all fields of study and all levels of study (Bachelor, Master and Doctoral levels).

Our main objective is to make our learning offer the most accessible to all our ERUA students. Therefore, we are engaged in fostering inclusion and overcoming the obstacles for physical mobility (due to socio-economic background, lack of time, job obligations, financial reasons, etc.) through implementing for instance more short term mobilities and blended learning.

ERUA is working hand-in-hand with its academic community to bring the best solutions to our future generations of European citizens.

ERUA will offer a wide range of learning opportunities:

• Intensive courses
• Travelling seminars
• Service learning
• Joint study programmes
• PrePhD training programme
• E-learning platform

Goals:

The general objective of this field of action is to create a strong community, spanning our campuses, based on common values, knowledge, languages and interests, between and among students, teachers, researchers and non-academic staff. We consider community-building and the creation of a collective feeling of belonging among students and staff a key objective for the construction of our European University. As a result, this field of action takes on a central role within the project: by developing a shared identity of ERUA students and staff and by yielding sustainable impact, it shoulders one of the main tasks in the implementation of our consortium and reinforces the processes that contribute to developing a shared European identity among all the members of the Alliance.

Measures:

We believe that the community building should put the main attention on staff and professional development – always including academic and non-academic staff. This is why we place specific emphasis on staff, since this is where identity and the feeling of belonging are fostered in a durable fashion.

The main activities are located in the field of staff capacity building, language policy, mobility and diversity. More precisely, we are focusing on four specific targets:

• Empowering academic and non-academic staff: non-academic staff (university services) as well as professors and researchers are considered as an underused leverage tool of the European mobility project and are therefore taken as the main starting point of our ERUA staff empowerment actions. We achieve this through activities such as an intercultural training module for non-academic staff in all partner universities and opportunities for exchange on the administration, the teaching, and the research level.
• We strive for an intelligent mix of different forms of virtual and physical mobility: We are devoting substantial resources to the promotion of “Internationalisation@home” by offering virtual teaching and learning experiences to our students and staff. At the same time, we focus on short-term study programmes at our universities in order to give opportunities for physical mobility to all groups of students and staff and to provide new types of mobility tailored to their respective needs.
• Sharing a common strategy on language policy: we are fostering the national languages of the consortium, our goal being a multilingual language policy reflecting the diversity of both our alliance and the student and staff body. This includes concrete measures such as online language training, language tandems, or on-site language courses to name but a few.
• Enhancing diversity: dealing with highly diverse student and staff bodies, we are focusing on standardizing support structures for all students and staff with special needs as well as persecuted researchers and refugee students

Strategy:

3 Flagships to connect and engage the 6 campuses in UAegean, the partners of ERUA and the ERUA Alliance with the outside word (stakeholders, partnerships, networks, etc).

Goal:

Develop and Adopt Common Digital tools for connectivity (students, campuses, and outside word), using “ready to use” infrastructures, and open source ways for platforms and applications. Under the 1st Flagship are been connected all the digital activities for Digital Mobility, Creative Digital Partnerships and Sustained engagements with Regions and Societies.

Goals:

This field of action aims to promote ERUA and its activities and results to relevant stakeholder communities thanks to a strong online presence as well as a set of powerful communication tools tailored to the diverse target groups.

These activities also address actions meant to ensure that all project-related publications comply with the principles of open science, open access and open data and to define how we will disseminate our project results beyond the Alliance, acting as a role model.

Measures:

• Developing an Alliance communication strategy and action plan, a Social Media Content and Engagement Strategy and Stakeholder engagement and public awareness programme
• Creation and implementation of a visual identity of the Alliance
• Developing and maintaining website and social media channels
• Planning and conducting different types of events to ensure better internal and external communication as well as opportunities for discussion among Alliance partners and meetings with external target audiences