Una Europa Virtual Exchange in Higher Education

UnaVEx

The Una Europa Virtual Exchange in Higher Education (UnaVEx) project aims to facilitate the co-creation and implementation of a virtual exchange framework for sustainability education across a partnership of leading European and African higher education institutions. The

UnaVEx project consortium is composed of three Una Europa partner universities, the University of Helsinki (Finland), the University of Bologna (Italy), KU Leuven (Belgium), and three African partner universities, the University of Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo), the University of Nairobi (Kenya), and the University of Johannesburg (South Africa). The project is anchored in the broader ambitions of the Una Europa – Africa partnership, an informal group initiated in early 2022, and is seen as a first concrete opportunity to bring together students from across Europe and Africa.

Universities across the globe are looking for new mobility opportunities, to continue to provide their students with meaningful international experiences, as socio-economic and sustainability considerations increasingly impact the feasibility of traditional physical mobility experiences for students world-wide. UnaVEx will take this shared priority as a starting point. Building on the Una Europa Micro-credential in Sustainability, this project will capitalise on the complementary strengths and unique expertise of the partner universities to co-create innovative Virtual Exchange (VE) interactions to the benefit of all students. UnaVEx will educate at least 2500 students from across the partnership and provide high-quality training to dozens of university staff to become facilitators. The VE will take place in small groups to encourage deep learning and interactive discussions on specific topics of sustainability transformation, climate change, biodiversity, sustainable economy, and the arts. Upon successful completion of the programme, students will receive a ‘Global Sustainability Advocate’

certificate.

Impact beyond the project consortium

The UnaVEx partners not only represent their own institutions but also form part of wider networks, which will also be able to benefit from the proposed project activities and, in turn, contribute to increased impact and visibility of the UnaVEx project. Notably, this includes the partner universities in the Una Europa Alliance as well as involved universities in the Una Europa – Africa Partnership. It is proposed that this group acts as an Advisory Body of UnaVEx to ensure continuous dialogue, external feedback and close links between this specific project and the broader remit of the group going forward. In addition, all Una Europa universities are supporting this project as associated partners, committed to promoting the

UnaVEx virtual exchange opportunities to their respective students. The project will therefore benefit from a prominent platform and direct access to the Una Europa student body of over half a million. Furthermore, this project has received the support of prominent public figures, such as the former President of Finland and the founder of the Global Sustainability Foundation Tarja Halonen, who will contribute as leading keynote speakers in the virtual exchange programme.

The estimated number of 2500 students refers to participants of the six consortium partners, with 50% of the students coming from UH, UNIBO and KUL and 50% of the students coming from UJ, UoN and UNIKIN, respectively. While UnaVEx puts special emphasis on students at Master level, the appeal of the project is broad and open to interested students at all levels of higher education as well as across both the social sciences and humanities and natural sciences. In addition to the half a million students in Una Europa, opportunities will also be opened up to universities in the Una Europa – Africa partnership, extending the expected number of students who will eventually be able to benefit from the virtual exchange opportunities even further. The consortium partners are also deeply embedded in other national and international networks, which will be crucial in supporting the broad dissemination of opportunities. In addition, the UnaVEx framework with associated guidelines for the implementation of Virtual Exchanges, which will be developed in the framework of this project (Work Package 2) is crucial to create meaningful impact. These guidelines are expected to not only be of great benefit in the context of Una Europa’s collaboration with global partners in the future but also of interest to other European University Alliances and strategic collaborations of universities more broadly. The partner universities are intrinsically international and collaborate with like-minded higher education institutions in all parts of the world. This infers great potential for take up and scalability of this framework across other partnerships in the future.

As part of the Communication & Dissemination Strategy of this project (Work Package 5), described in more detail in section 3.2, the framework and associated guidelines will be made publicly available to the benefit of interested stakeholders globally. At the end of the project, leading academics from across the partner institutions will come together to produce peer-reviewed papers and academic journal contributions to share experiences, engage in critical reflection and disseminate UnaVEx best practices even more widely.

Furthermore, the topic of sustainability in itself is highly interdisciplinary in nature and naturally scalableto different contexts, providing further opportunities to multiply the online facilitated activities for wider use both during and after the project’s lifetime.

UJs role – Leading WP4  with University of Kinshasa

Work Package 4: Sustainability education for the next generation via virtual exchanges

This WP constitutes a central strand of the UnaVEx project, focused on delivering training and education of soft skills, motivating and empowering students for sustainability studies by participating in the virtual exchange workshops. The exchanges will be based on the virtual exchange framework for sustainability education, developed as part of WP2 and will therefore start in M12 and continue to the end of the project’slifetime (M36).

The UnaVEx project consortium foresees the organisation of five virtual exchange calls, which will each target 500 students from across the partner institutions. In doing so, the UnaVEx project will ultimately reach a total of 2500 students throughout the project’s lifetime. The specific timings for the virtual exchanges remain flexible and will be discussed in collaboration with all project partners to ensure that the proposed timelines are suitable taking into account different academic calendars. This includes consideration to be given to the differing time zones across the project consortium. It is currently suggested that one intensive week of virtual exchanges (3-5 days) is organised per academic semester,in full respect of the different institutional circumstances.

The virtual exchange calls will be announced on a central UnaVEx project website as well as featured on dedicated web pages, which will be embedded in each institution’s website. Central guidance will beprovided with general principles for recruitment as well as a central registration tool. This will ensure that the recruitment of UnaVEx students takes a uniform approach and, at the same time, is aligned with the specific approach for student recruitment at each partner university. The call for participation will also be shared via all associated partners as well as national, European and international networks active in the field to ensure that as large a group of students as possible will be reached.

Lead for UJ – Dr Lee-Ann Modley supported by Prof Isaac Rampedi

Moderator Call