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Health and Wellbeing Summer Meeting

On the 28th of June, the Health and Wellbeing Pilot Domain is organizing a summer meeting with a duo purpose to show education and research activities in the Health and Wellbeing pilot domain. The aim is to pave the way for the birth of a Health and wellbeing community within Aurora, with collaborations among the AURORA partners in the field of Education and Research. Therefore, the focus of the meeting is to present the activities in the field of Health and Wellbeing and to exchange ideas on current and future activities.

Programme

10.00 – 10.05 am Welcome and Introduction

10.05-10.20 am Presentation of a map of the Health and Wellbeing education within the Aurora universities

10.20 -11.00 am Education Session

Participants (one or two for each university) presents the teaching activities within the Health and wellbeing domain. Each presenter should provide information on:

  • Initiatives opened or to be opened to all aurora students
  • Existing, planned or even ideas for new activities in collaboration with other Aurora partners

11.00-11.15 Discussion

11.15-12.00 am Research Session

Each university presents their research interests by answering the following questions

  • what are the main areas of research of my University
  • Research infrastructures that could be shared among Aurora Universities (WP 4.2)
  • How being part of the Aurora Network could bring benefits to your research activities

Participants can register at the following link

Aurora Ranks in Times Higher Education Impact Rankings

Aurora universities have appeared in high positions in the Times Higher Education SDG ranking and excelled in numerous SDGs.

Times Higher Education has ranked universities based on their performance against indicators of global social and economic impact and advancement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The Times Higher Education Impact Rankings consider all 17 SDGs, and each university is scored for its performance in advancing each goal. A university’s overall ranking is then based on its top three SDG scores plus its score for Goal 17, Partnerships for the Goals.

Aurora member university, the University of Aberdeen, has been placed 57th out of 1,115 institutions worldwide in the newly published Times Higher Education (THE) Impact Rankings. Areas in which the university has excelled include Partnership for the Goals (SDG17) and Sustainable Cities and Communities (SDG11), where Aberdeen has been placed 27th globally for both. The University of Iceland has ranked in the SDGs health and wellbeing (SDG3), industry, innovation and infrastructure (SDG9), as well as responsible consumption and production (SDG12). The University of Iceland’s overall position in THE Impact Rankings is 301-400. Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) maintains its position, although 347 more institutions have entered this ranking and have high rankings for Climate Action (SDG13), Gender Equality (SDG5) and Quality Education (SDG4).  UEA ranked between 101-200 out of 1,115 institutions in total, placing it in the top 20% for its sustainable development. UEA participated in six of the 17 SDGs, and achieved some other positive results, including 57th place out of a possible 653 for ‘Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions’ (SDG16). Joint 74th out of a possible 871 for ‘Good Health and Wellbeing (SDG3). The four SDGs to which VU Amsterdam connects the most are Climate Action (SDG13), Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure (SDG 9), Gender Equality (SDG 5), Reduced Inequalities (SDG 10). The overarching position of the university in the Impact ranking 2021 is in the range of 101-200. Aurora associate member university, Palacký University Olomouc, has rankings in Good health and wellbeing (SDG3), Decent Work and Economic growth (SDG8), Sustainable Cities and Communities (SDG11), and Partnerships for the Goal (SDG17). Overall the university is ranked in the 401-600 position.

Aurora congratulates its universities with these outstanding results. Aurora is extremely committed to matching academic excellence with societal impact, and these rankings prove that we are well on our way. The Aurora SDG Bibliometrics tool developed is an exceptional tool that maps the research output by all our universities: please view the tool here. More about Aurora here.

New Aurora Secretary-General: Board appoints Anne-May Janssen

Kees Kouwenaar will retire and step down as Secretary-General on July 25th, 2021. We will give proper attention to the role which Kees has played on September 17th, 2021.

The Board of the Aurora Universities Network is now pleased to announce the appointment of Ms Anne-May Janssen to succeed Mr Kees Kouwenaar as Aurora’s Secretary General; to ensure a smooth and efficient handover, Ms Janssen will start working at the Aurora office on July 1st.

Ms Janssen completed her degree in Public Policy and Human Development at Maastricht School of Governance.  She started her career as a junior lecturer at Maastricht University. In 2011 she made the switch to the Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs as a policy officer. In 2014 Ms Janssen moved to Brussels to work at the Netherlands House for Education and Research (Neth-ER) as an account manager for the Netherlands Federation of University Medical Centres (NFU) and Nuffic. Ms Janssen primarily lobbied for the NFU and successfully influenced the European Commission to include the NFU’s research priorities in the 2016 Horizon 2020 Health Work Programme. From 2017 onwards, Ms Janssen is the Head of European Engagement at Universities UK International (UUKi) in London. She leads UUKi’s European policy and engagement activities and works to maximise the sector’s profile, impact and visibility in Brussels and other European capitals and countries.

The Board is convinced that Anne-May Janssen will bring great expertise to Aurora and prove to be a Secretary-General with a great focus on engagement and working together with the Aurora partner universities and their students. It will be a challenge to continue the great work of Kees Kouwenaar, Aurora’s first Secretary-General, but the Board is convinced that Anne-May Janssen has the competence and skills needed to guide Aurora to the next stage.

In an interview, Mr Kouwenaar and Ms Janssen share their views on recent development in Higher Education and the embeddedness of university in society. Please watch the video here:

Service-Learning Programme: Opportunities and Challenges

At the core of Aurora Alliance is its cardinal goal to equip students with the right knowledge, skills, mindset, and experience to address societal challenges as agents of change. The Service-Learning Programme (SLP) work package (WP 3.1.3) supports bringing this core mission of the Aurora Alliance to fruition. Service-learning (SL) is an academic teaching/learning method that connects meaningful community service with University learning, personal growth, and civic responsibility. It provides an opportunity for both teachers and students to engage with society in a meaningful way that entails knowledge sharing, experiential learning, and problem-solving. The SLP is working to support academics and support staff in the use of SL and fostering its value and application in Aurora universities. It is also involved in linking students with SL courses and equipping them with relevant competences to tackle societal challenges as social entrepreneurs and innovators.

As the first part of our effort to foster SL in Aurora universities, we identify SL courses across different faculties/departments and pilot domains in universities. While most universities already have existing SL or SL-like courses, they are either obscure or not identified as such. We seek to bring visibility to these courses. We are also identifying SL champions – teachers and students who have found value in SL and effective social engagement strategies that have enriched their teaching/learning experience. We aim to amplify their voices and lessons learnt to provide both inspiration and motivation for others.

The SLP is also working towards a Service Learning Toolbox that will provide relevant tools/resources to interested teachers and students to learn about SL. These tools could further strengthen existing SL courses and provide teachers with inspiration on how to transform an existing course into an SL one. It will also have resources for both teachers and students to learn about the essential concepts of SL, participation, reflexivity, and community engagement.

Another important initiative of SLP is the International Learning Lab on the 17th June 2021 [15:30 to 18:00 CEST]. The event is open for students, teachers and experts from the Aurora universities and other national/international guest Universities for a wider discourse on SL and the official launch of the SL toolbox. The event will include talks from international SL experts: Prof. Robert Bringle (Professor Emeritus, Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis, USA), Prof. Wolfgang Stark (Professor Emeritus, Universität Duisburg Essen, Germany), and Prof. Marjolein Zweekhorst (Professor, Athena Institute, VU Amsterdam). The event will also include presentations of students from Interdisciplinary Service Learning (iCSL2) – an “Aurorised” course open to Master students from any discipline/program across Aurora universities. You are invited to participate in this event (more information here).

The opportunities provided by SL in universities is undeniable. However, there is still not enough recognition of the importance and benefits of SL in universities, which is the main challenge we are currently facing. It is imperative to promote service-learning as a tool for societal engagement to change the mindset of both teachers and students and an essential paradigm of teaching/learning in universities. Let’s join hands in promoting and fostering SL in our universities.

Want more stories like these? Then sign up here for our quarterly newsletter, where we update the public on the most recent developments in Aurora.

Aurora Mini-Grants – List of awarded Mini-Grants

After a very successful first call for applications, in which 27 applications were filed, the Aurora Central Office at Palacky University has finished its evaluation. It is our pleasure to announce the applications that will be awarded a Mini-Grant.

Out of the 27 applications, 18 project applications were chosen to receive funding. In total, more than 1,6 Million Czech Crowns have been awarded in this first round. The funding of these projects paid directly from UP’s Rectorate’s sources will serve to further strengthen the Aurora Alliance, and will directly benefit these projects set up by academics.

This pilot phase of UP Aurora Mini-Grants received a wide range of applications, spanning several different fields, from five faculties and research centres. Below please find the list of funded projects:

  • Barbora SITTOVÁ – Webinars on German grammar
  • David LIVINGSTONE – Promoting Mental Health among Students with Online Cultural Entertainment
  • Elona KRASNIQI -Evidencing online risks of youth’s mental health of those coming from state care, and foster care.
  • Filip KRAUS – Academic Networking on Researching Migration, Identities, and Sexualities in the Vietnamese Diaspora
  • František KRATOCHVÍL – Wordnets for low-resource languages: Creating a roadmap for using NLP technology to aid language documentation, description, and maintenance
  • Jaroslava KUBÁTOVÁ -Sustainable Social Enterprises
  • Lenka DZUROVÁ – Protein engineering in the collaboration with appropriate Aurora Partner Universities
  • Ľudmila LACKOVÁ – Aurorization of the course Complex Analysis of Text and Communication Process
  • Lukáš ZÁMEČNÍK HADWIGER – Theory of Digital Humanities
  • Michal PEPRNÍK – Sharing expertise in English studies: PhD workshops and international conference
  • Miroslav KOPECKÝ – Active ageing – a healthy lifestyle
  • Pavel ZAHRÁDKA – Remix Culture in the Music Industry
  • Pavlína FLAJŠAROVÁ – Aurora-Shared Interdisciplinary Series of Lectures on Cultural Diversity
  • Peter TAVEL – The starting shot
  • Petra VACULÍKOVÁ- Cradle for Excellence in Social Sciences and Humanities (CROSS)
  • Petra VACULÍKOVÁ – Colonialism in 21st Century
  • Silvie VÁLKOVÁ – Bringing Academic Writing courses in English up-to-date
  • Tereza MOTALOVÁ – Galileo for Open Science: Network of Stewards and Navigation Interface for the World of Open Science (“OS Galileo”)

Ordered alphabetically, based on the first name of the PI.

The applicants were asked to specify whether their project dealt with Education, Research, and/or Professionalization, with most proposals concentrating on either Education or research. The applicants were also asked to disclose the partner and associate partners named and included in the proposal. The University of Innsbruck and our associate partners from Kosice proved to be the most frequent collaborators.

The Sustainable Development Goals also hold an important position in all of Aurora’s endeavours. The applicants were asked to pick at least one of the SDGs and demonstrate how their proposal contributes to that goal. SDG 4: Quality Education and SGD 17: Partnership for the Goals were chosen most often, with SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being proving popular as well.

The UP Aurora Office looks back on a promising, successful pilot phase for its Mini-Grant scheme. They are looking forward to further developing the scheme for future calls, and above all, they look forward to seeing these Mini-Grants contribute to the excellent international projects academics will carry out!

Aurora EU Global Approach Strategy

The European Commission scheduled to renew its international cooperation strategy (EU Global Approach) to replace the 2012 version. Aurora has prepared its input for this strategy with 8 recommendations.

The European Union (EU) wants to play a meaningful and positive role in the world at large. This requires both competitiveness and collaboration to tackle global challenges as pointed out in the international cooperation strategy published in 2012. Europe needs to cooperate at an international level with a strong, qualitative high level of research and innovation to get access to the best people, ideas and facilities. The European Commission (EC) pointed out in its work programme for 2021 that a renewal of the current strategy for international cooperation is needed. The EC wants to co-create the international cooperation strategy based on current prioritized European themes, global challenges, geopolitical considerations as well as integral inclusion of education in this strategy.

This aligns with the vision of Aurora: matching academic excellence (against global standards) with societal relevance towards global sustainability and well-being. Aurora member universities work together as higher education institutions (HEIs) with students and society around the world to learn from each other and to become better at what we care about most: learning together and researching for a strong and bright future for students, researchers, businesses, policymakers and the wider society, contributing to achieving global challenges.

In view of our position on the European Education and Research Areas, Aurora has provided its advice for a new “Global Approach to research, innovation, education and youth” in eight recommendations. This includes extending interoperability of information systems in higher education globally, finding a new balance between EU and UK to secure the established collaborations on R&I and education, using higher education institutes to foster democratic culture and practices through more interaction on education and research, and providing sustainable support for European Universities Alliances serving as linking pin between research, innovation, all levels of education and skilling, and the wider society.

Our perspectives encompass a view from HEIs and their contributions, the role and contribution of Aurora as a group of societally-engaged and comprehensive, research-intensive universities, and the role that European Universities Alliances may exert. For the full position paper, read here.

Aurora’s International online master-level course “ICT4D in the Field” in 2021

The master-level “ICT4D in the Field” is the first course in the Aurora pilot “Digital Society and Global Citizenship”. Previously, this course has been carried out in a real-world environment. Students were exposed to complex contexts and real-world challenges. They design and implement practical, user-centred and sustainable socio-technological solutions for disadvantaged communities according to a Community Service Learning (CSL) approach. This year the course has been “Aurorized”,, i.e. redesigned as part of the Aurora Alliance educational pilot, into “collaborative online international learning” while maintaining its global and Community Service flavour. The course’s central theme this year will be: “Artificial Intelligence in and for the Global South”

Currently, AI is at the centre of attention as an innovative ICT technology with a wide range of beneficial application opportunities. However, others express doubts and concerns about various developments as undesirable or dangerous. Heavy investments to boost AI and Data Science are taking place in the Global North, particularly in the big power blocks of the US, Europe and China. The course ICT4D in the Field undertakes to investigate these matters in and for the Global South, thereby giving due attention to the specific contexts of people’s needs and the different geographic, economic, cultural and socio-political contexts.

Students will work in groups focused on different geographies (countries/regions) in the South seeking to answer a number of key questions:

  • What is the state-of-play regarding AI applications for the Social Good relevant to people in the Global South? Here, one may think of a reference point of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as combating hunger, ensuring food security, reducing inequalities, etc.
  • What is associated with foreseeable negative or adverse consequences, risks, and social impacts related to the application of AIs, and how may they be mitigated?
  • In consequence, what are the implications to be drawn for the application of AI specifically in the context of the respective Global South countries or regions, in terms of policies, regulation, investment, education, civil/civic debate?

The course will take place in June 2021. It will involve lectures and workshop talks, informed argument writing, reviewing and discussion, collaborative project group work, and presentation. This full-time course is concentrated on four weeks. Master students are invited to apply by sending a motivation letter. However, the course can host a limited number of participants only. A visual preview of the course:

The course targets students doing masters in information sciences, artificial intelligence, computer science, digital humanities, computational social science, but other digital multidisciplinary domains are welcome to apply.

For more information, please contact Dr Anna Bon (a.bon@vu.nl). Please access the flyer of this course here

The Importance of Open Education Resources (OER) within Aurora

The Aurora Open Education Recourses working group is one of the first working groups established by the Network in 2018. Students have been a part of the working group from the beginning and brought in the special user-orientated perspective which fit in just right with the technical, organizational and strategic expertise of teachers, researchers and staff, particularly the library directors of the Aurora network.

The OER working group supports and encourages collaboration between teachers by reusing and remixing open materials. It aims to tackle the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals on Equal Education by guaranteeing access to knowledge in high-quality and credible content anywhere.

Challenges and Opportunities

Open Education Resources are essential for many reasons. One reason is the rising cost of textbooks which is different for various study courses.
Secondly, when we aspire to create the opportunity to study for a student body with a broader socioeconomic background and tackle equal education, OER plays a crucial role in accessing the material, regardless of students and researchers’ economic background. OER can provide materials for teaching, learning and research. The growth and expansion of the internet have made access to OER more common worldwide, but filtering the relevant and appropriate material is left up to the user’s assessment. Where the pertinent textbooks will have their strengths and weaknesses, OER material allows a faculty member to pull only strong material into their class. OER also represents an opportunity to have one’s materials enhanced. By allowing the material to be modified by other faculties around the world. An OER creator has the chance to see the material used in ways never imagined. That type of exposure and collaboration is not possible with material that lives on a local computer or only in print.

The philosophy behind OER is that knowledge is a public rather than personal good and should be for the greater good- shared free of charge. Therefore, the challenging first step is to motivate all the partner Universities members to follow that philosophy to enlarge the Material, which is accessible through OER.

Like never before, the pandemic has shown us the strengths of OER. Distant learning formats had to be created in a short period of time and profited by OER material. Due to the circumstances, OER took a big step forward in acknowledging its importance for Universities. Finally, OER is the basis of numerous projects within the Aurora Network. Connecting the OER working group to current Aurora initiatives in the field of innovation of teaching and learning,’ ‘diversity and inclusion’ and ‘student engagement’ is vital and guarantees future viability.

Written by Aylin Kilic, member of the Aurora Student Council

Aurora Alliance Mini-Grant Programme 2021

The International Division of Palacky University Olomouc (UP) is launching Aurora Alliance Mini-Grant Programme to further support the development of the European Universities strategic partnership goals of the Aurora Alliance. This scheme aims to strengthen the cooperation of Palacky University Olomouc with other eight Aurora Alliance university partners beyond the current project activity scope.

It primarily offers an opportunity to UP Faculties, Education and Research Centres to engage in academic and professional cooperation across the disciplines within the Aurora Alliance. The scheme supports the bottom-up approach and invites academicians and professional staff to build the working teams with Aurora partners by prioritizing their own international academic collaboration ambitions.

Duration and length

The mini-grants programme aims to have three calls – February 2021, January 2022, January 2023. The first call in February 2021, is aimed as initial support of project start and will allow the successful projects to commence in April 2021. The following two calls will be open to supporting both continuation of the commenced projects and the new mini-projects each year.

Procedure and Selection Criteria

The project application form is to be submitted by 29th March (First Call Opening on 16th of February 2021). Aurora Central Team with a Selection Committee consisting of Vice-Dean for Internationalization will announce the successfully awarded projects by April 14th 2021.

Interested? Apply before March 29th, 2021. For more information, please view the document .

Join a short course in Europe this summer

Ready to make the most of your summer? Want to study in another part of Europe?

Learn a new skill, develop new knowledge to enhance your degree studies and graduate prospects?

All Aurora university students have the benefit of learning what’s on offer this summer at other Aurora universities, through this one-stop-shop of your Aurora options this summer*. From Global Health to International Criminal Justice and from Central Europe and European Integration to Global Transitional Sociology, there’s a range of subjects to suit everyone, and in many cases, special discounts are provided for students from other Aurora universities.

So what are you waiting for?

Click the button below to access the summer school courses, find out more, check dates and deadlines, and find out how to apply.

Each Aurora Alliance university has an allocation of Aurora Alliance funding to support outward mobility and this may be available for short courses in Europe this summer. Please check with your home university’s study abroad office for details on how to access relevant funding.

Would you like to be kept updated with Aurora university short courses and summer schools and associated funding opportunities? Please register your interest by completing this short form. You can also use the form to ask questions that we can direct to the appropriate Aurora university.

We hope you will be able to take the opportunity to study abroad at another Aurora university during your degree!

*Please note that some dates are to be confirmed and delivery modes may change due to unforeseen circumstances. Please get in touch directly with the hosting university for final details.