On Monday 28th of June 2021 at 14:00-16:00 CET, the webinar “Being awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship in the Aurora Network” will be hosted. This webinar is a great opportunity for the exchange of young talented scientists across the Aurora network. We will discuss how to apply for an MSCA fellowship and will report the experience of a current fellow, supervisor and evaluator.

The objective of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships (PFs) is to support researchers’ careers and foster excellence in research. The Postdoctoral Fellowships action targets researchers holding a PhD who wish to carry out their research activities abroad, acquire new skills and develop their careers. PFs help researchers gain experience in other countries, disciplines and non-academic sectors.

SPEAKERS

Angela Zampella, Leader of the Health and Wellbeing Domain of the AURORA Alliance Angelo D’Agostino, Italian National Contact Point APRE Maria Romano, MSCA Fellow Alfonso De Simone, MSCA Supervisor Pasquale Maffia, MSCA Evaluator

Event details

The open event will take place on Zoom

ZOOM LINK – Meeting ID: 948 3501 9172 – Passcode: 479910

On September 27th, Aurora celebrates languages to raise awareness about cultural and language diversity. Also, the event aims to gather and discuss ideas, thoughts and experiences about implementing plurilingualism in teaching and learning activities. The round table event starts from 4 pm to 6 pm, and will be structured in two parts:

The first part starts with three interventions: A) Giancarmine Bongo will present the theme of multilingualism in Aurora and the main activities that the universities of Aurora have in the field. B) Alma Ágústsdóttir, Aurora Student President, will speak to present the views of students in Aurora on language teaching and learning and multilingualism. C) Sophie Belanger (Unite! Alliance) will present the choices, perspectives and difficulties of the Unite!

In the second part, small groups will discuss the themes presented in breakout rooms.

Access the flyer here

On June 18th 2021, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Ethics talk will be given by Prof. Dr Guglielmo Tamburrini (U Napoli Federico II, Italy) and is part of the global course ICT4D in the field. The talk is organized into three parts.

The first part reviews distinctive and ethically sensitive traits of contemporary AI technologies: widespread semantic opaqueness of information processing, bias duplication and amplification, infrequent but surprising errors.

In the second part, a variety of local applications for AI technologies are examined where these traits raise substantive ethical concerns. These notably include autonomous weapons systems, autonomous vehicles and other real-time systems which must respect hard temporal deadlines in their perception-decision-action cycles.

Finally, in the third part, it is shown that Artificial Intelligence has increasing – and double-edged – roles to play in connection with ethical issues having a genuinely global dimension: the climate crisis, the preservation of international peace and stability, the protection of democratic participation in political decision-making.

About Prof. Dr. Guglielmo Tamburrini:

Guglielmo Tamburrini is a Philosophy of Science and Technology Professor at Università di Napoli Federico II in Italy (Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology). His main research interests include the ethics of human interactions with robotic and AI systems. He was the coordinator of the first European project on the ethics of robotics (CA ETHICBOTS, 2005-2008, VI FP). In 2014 he was awarded the Giulio Preti International Prize by the Regional Parliament of Tuscany for his research and teaching on ethical implications of ICT and robotic technologies. He is a member of ICRAC (International Committee for Robot Arms Control).

Event link Passcode: ICT4DitF

The Aurora Student Council is delighted to be hosting the Aurora Care and Compassion Student event. This free virtual conference is packed with engaging content showing how Aurora cares for issues in modern society and will get students involved in activities and conversation across 4 key areas. These areas are Mental Health and Wellbeing, Open Educational Resources, Celebrating and Promoting Diversity, and Sustainability.

Students’ participation in these activities and conversations will give them practical skills to take away and also help Aurora embed student voice into the heart of many exciting projects. We want students to learn about Aurora and equip them with the tools to champion Aurora’s values in their own universities.

If you are a student interested in any of these topics or you know of students that would be interested, click the link here to register your interest and come and join us on March 30th 2021.

Click here for the program of the event.

Follow this page for updates on this event

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.

Follow this page for updates on this event.

On the 17th of June 2021, the Aurora Service Learning Toolbox (SL Toolbox) will be launched at the International Learning Lab and will take place from 15:30 to 18:00 CEST.

The Toolbox will provide relevant tools/resources to interested teachers and students to learn about SL. These tools could further strengthen existing SL courses and can provide inspiration to teachers 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 including participation, reflexivity, and community engagement.

The event is open for students, teachers and experts from the Aurora universities and other national/international guest Universities for a wider discourse on service learning.

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.

Click here for more information and access to the zoom meeting ID and password.