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.

Date and time: Tuesday, March 23, 2021, at 5:00 p.m. (17:00) Central European Time (UTC+1) Panellists: Saa Dittoh (UDS, Ghana), Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer (UNIMAS, Malaysia), Anna Bon (VU Amsterdam, the Netherlands) Moderator: Hans Akkermans (w4ra.org, the Netherlands) An important open question of Digital Humanism is how ethical and social aspects of digital technologies and associated matters of human values and social justice can be handled appropriately in academic research and education. A possible approach is to create interdisciplinary courses on ethics and philosophy of technology such as “Tech Ethics”. This panel investigates approaches that have their roots in direct collaboration from academia with outside (underprivileged, marginalised) communities as an integral element of research and education. Case examples and experiences from three different continents are discussed, giving some perspective on the simultaneous universality and contextualises of human values and social justice.

TALKS:

Knowledge for Service: Digital Technology Positives and Negatives in African Rural Societies Saa Dittoh

Many decades ago (and possibly now in some areas) in rural Africa, communal methods of information sharing were not always face-to-face; some were virtual, through high-pitched voices and loud sounding “talking drums” that gave “coded information”. No wonder that many African rural societies have no reservations about adopting appropriate modern digital technologies. The rapid advance in digital technology has been positive in many ways. Still, several harmful and damaging aspects threaten the values, cultures, and even the very existence of some African rural societies’ very existence. In this talk, I discuss those threats and suggests ways to counter them. This talk further highlights how knowledge can be put to service and how university students can be engaged in this.

Digital Sociotechnical Innovation and Indigenous Knowledge Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer

In this talk, I will discuss how university research and education on digital technology can empower under-served communities. I particularly describe the eBario program as a long-standing university-community partnership between the rural Kelabit community, one of Borneo ethnic minorities, and the University Malaysia Sarawak. This program to bridge the digital divide started in 1998, with the indigenous Kelabit community taking on the information and knowledge creation pathway as a way forward. Over the past two decades, the program has evolved to become recognised as a living laboratory, influencing practice and policy, with, for example, a role in poverty reduction. eBario, as an ICT for Development model, has been replicated to cover eight other sites across the Peninsula and East Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak. However, the biggest achievement resides in the development of community scholars and the community-led life-long-learning initiatives that go on till today.

Digital Divide, Inclusion and Community Service Learning Anna Bon

Community service-learning (CSL) is an educational approach that we have further developed in collaboration with universities and stakeholders in the Global South into a research and education model dubbed: ICT4D 3.0. This model combines problem-solving and situational learning with meaningful service to communities and society. In computer science and artificial intelligence education – traditionally purely technologically oriented – ICT4D 3.0 integrates CSL’s societal and ethical principles with user-centred design and socio-technical problem-solving. Being exposed to complex, societal real-world problems, students learn by exploring, reflecting, co-designing in close interaction with communities in a real-world environment. This type of education provides a rich learning environment for “Bildung”.

To participate via Zoom with password: 0dzqxqiy. The talk will also be live-streamed and recorded on YouTube.

For further announcements and information about the speakers, see here.

This series of two one-day online workshops are designed for academics to enhance their intercultural skills and broaden the scope of pedagogical competencies of teaching internationally diverse classrooms.

Outcomes and Highlights:

• Increased understanding of how culture influences our teaching and learning;
• Pedagogies respecting different learning styles, needs, and supporting student engagement;
• Creating inclusive classrooms for all, both international and domestic students;
• Enhancement of academics’ intercultural skills;
• Designing international courses with global learning objectives and well-built syllabi.

Cost: 5,500 CZK (210,- Euro)

SCHEDULE:

• 1st-day session: the 23rd of April 9:00–12:15, 13:00–16:15
• 2nd-day session: the 11th of June 9:00–12:15, 13:00–16:15

For detailed information, see: https://iei.upol.cz/trainings/

For registration email: eva.janebova@upol.cz (official registration is closed)

The University of East Anglia (UEA) are delighted to be hosting the second Aurora COVID Student Conference on 7th May from 14:00-17:00 (BST). This is a free virtual conference for students from across all Aurora Universities to hear from, and engage with, experts working at Aurora partner institutions who have been active in responding to and researching the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Confirmed speakers are Prof Helena Gillespie and Prof Yoon Loke (UEA), Ingibjörg Magnúsdóttir and Anna Bára Unnarsdóttir (University of Iceland), with Dr. Kelly Edmunds and Prof Neil Ward (UEA) also available for questions.

This conference should be of particular interest to students who are interested in infectious diseases or who are considering a project or dissertation related to COVID-19. The conference will close with a discussion of the key themes that emerge during the plenary sessions. To register your interest in joining this free conference, please email Maria.Fox@uea.ac.uk before 13:00 May 7th 2021.

Conference schedule

14:00 Opening Remarks by Prof Neil Ward (UEA)

14:10 Counting the harm from COVID – an inexact science by Prof Yoon Loke (UEA)

14:50 The Icelandic COVID-19 National Resilience Cohort – preliminary results for students by Ingibjörg Magnúsdóttir and Anna Bára Unnarsdóttir (University of Iceland)

15:30 Break

15:45 Internationalisation and Study Abroad After Covid by Prof Helena Gillespie (UEA)

16:25 Conference Discussion / Questions from attendees Chaired by Prof Neil Ward

17:00 Conference Close