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After a long and demanding process that lasted 6 months, the European University EDUC achieved one of its first very important milestones within Work Package 9 “Education meets Research” led by the University of Cagliari: the choice of the most relevant research topics on which the academic/research staff of the 6 Universities will foster cooperation in the next years and beyond, and the indicators to assess the results achieved.
The decision process was built on the analysis of the universities' strengths and their capacity to strongly contribute to the European (Horizon Europe) and Regional policies (S3), with the aim to become a major research actor on the European scene
The choice was made, after involving the EDUC alliance researchers through an analysis of current cooperations, at the highest level (by the Vice Presidents for Internationalization and for Research) during a meeting in Cagliari last February, followed by further refining in two other meetings.
Seven are the topics identified in order to cover a wide range of themes in line with the main characteristic of the EDUC Alliance, multidisciplinarity:
- Lifelong Health and Wellbeing
- Cyber Security and Artificial Intelligence
- European Union Studies
- Sustainable Changes: climate and resources
- Justice, Inequality, and Inclusion
- Mobility / Smart Cities
- Culture and Heritage.
The topics chosen by the Alliance represent a very good balance between hard sciences and socio-humanities, with the aim to give a wide range of researchers the possibility to successfully cooperate. Moreover, most of the themes address societal challenges which imply the need for cross-disciplinary contributions and the direct involvement of local ecosystems and policy makers.
The next step will be organizing topic-centered seminars to allow Ph.D. students as well as senior researchers of the EDUC Universities to meet personally, present their activities, discuss, and possibly start new collaborations or strengthen existing ones by also enlarging the number of partners. EDUC and the French Government will fund several mobilities to foster the participation of Ph.D. students and senior researchers of each EDUC University in the seminar they are most interested in.
Seminars will be held in the 5 EDUC Countries according to the Partner in charge of leading the organization.
Locations are those indicated below, however, due to the emergency of COVID-19, seminars will probably start in autumn and the calendar together with the participation rules will be published in the next months.
1. Lifelong Health and Wellbeing – Pécs (Hungary); 2. Cyber Security and Artificial Intelligence – Masaryk (Brno, Czech Republic); 3. European Union Studies – Cagliari (Italy); 4. Sustainable Changes: climate and resources – Potsdam (Germany); 5. Justice, Inequality, and Inclusion - Paris-Nanterre (France); 6. Mobility / Smart Cities - Rennes (France); 7. Culture and Heritage - Paris-Nanterre (France)
The European Universities Initiative is a flagship initiative of the European Education Area. It will enable a new generation of Europeans to cooperate across languages, borders, and disciplines, developing a strong European identity. European Digital UniverCity (EDUC) will strengthen the European identification process by enhancing knowledge creation and by putting forward European skills acquisition through digitally supported cross-campus and cross-disciplinary teaching activities as well as various learning opportunities.
The project co-financed by the Erasmus+ programme, started in October 2019, foresees the cooperation of six International partners coming from 5 EU countries:
University of Potsdam (Germany) as lead partner, University of Cagliari (Italy), Masaryk University (Czech Republic), University of Paris Nanterre (France), University of Pécs (Hungary) University of Rennes 1 (France).