Aurora Spring Academic Meeting

Meet peers facing similar challenges in providing students with high-quality education and with international opportunities in a forced online environment. Learn what support Aurora is organising to assist academic teachers in meeting these challenges. On March 30th, from 9 am to 1 pm (CET), Aurora is hosting its Spring Academic meeting. It will be a platform to meet with peers and discuss how to provide high quality learning under the currently restricted conditions. The Aurora Spring Academic meeting is a follow up to the Aurora Community building event of January 28th, 2019, focusing on the same domains. The Spring meeting is an event in the Aurora Alliance European University programme, which aims to strengthen the way in which Aurora students are equipped with the skills and mind-sets to act as social entrepreneurs and innovators in addressing societal problems. The Event The Spring Academic meeting aims at academic who feel attached to the following domains:

1. Sustainability & Climate Change
2. Digital Society & Global Citizenship
3. Health & Well-being
4. Culture: Diversity & Identity
5. Social Entrepreneurship & Innovation.

The Spring event is organised mostly in parallel strands for each of the domains to meet. There will be ample time in the programme to freely discuss topics of mutual interest – in education, research or otherwise. The core of the programme will be sessions on two key challenges in higher education with the current restrictions:

• How are we as academic teachers finding our way from high-quality analogue (or offline) to digital (or online) education,
• How can we continue to provide our students with a meaningful international experience, particularly in the pandemic and post-pandemic context,

Topics and tools The Aurora Spring Academic event is an excellent opportunity to find out how your university’s participation in Aurora can be valuable to you: as a platform to meet with peers, find out how you can learn from and with each other, learn about the tools Aurora is developing to support the member universities in providing academically excellent and societally relevant education. In the sessions, you will have the opportunity to discuss what you see as the most pressing issues in these two key challenges – and how these can be addressed. With the maintenance of quality in virtual education, there will be specific attention to higher education’s value beyond the subject-related knowledge and skills. With continued international dimensions with less physical mobility, there will be specific attention on tools and platforms for virtual mobility and online joint courses. The Aurora Spring Academic event will be hosted on the Gatherly platform, which allows you to freely move and chat with participants in groups of two’s or three’s or more. Info-desks Before and after the sessions, you may visit info desks on the various tools and platforms developed in the Aurora European University Alliance programme; see below under the programme description. You can stop by the info desks of your interest and get in touch with the colleagues involved. Take-aways So what can you expect as takeaways from this event?

1. Meet, discuss and arrange follow-up contact with peers on your issues and concerns in the transit from analogue to high-quality digital education and/or students’ international opportunities
2. Find out about existing good practices in high-quality digital education and virtual international experience
3. Learn about useful Aurora tools and platforms for these challenges and meet the experts who can help you use them.

Please view the full programme of the event here.