Campus Europae Newsletter, November 2009

Table of contents

  • Why "Hook Up!"?

  • Fast Facts

    • Outcomes of Humanities Subject Committee meeting in Aveiro

    • Furthering mobility in Natural Sciences

  • Upcoming events
    • Student Council Plenary Meeting
    • Board of Directors Meeting

Why Hook Up?!

To “hook up” is to come together with someone. In Campus Europae, the reason to hook up is to learn languages, mostly online; individually and in a group; before, during and after going abroad; requires hooking up teachers from various universities to create and teach a single language module; hooking up CE movers to language courses adapted to their level of knowledge of the foreign language and lastly but not least, hooking into a collaborative stance past, present and future CE movers with different native languages and cultural backgrounds. The purpose of all this hooking up is to learn and practice the foreign language of the university and country which will be home, is home or was home for one full academic year irrespective of the foreign languages offered by your home university and cost. The key word to hooking up is collaboration. It fosters ideals of respect and openness to others, to other cultures, to other approaches. It is an opportunity to learn and experience: languages certainly, but also cooperation and the European added value.

This project funded with the financial assistance of the EU is not asking staff from the 18 universities participating in the project to sit in their offices and come up with a complete language course at A1 level, in French for example, to be used by all CE movers. This project is asking that foreign language teachers from at least 3 universities come together and connect to develop the aforementioned product (face to face and online) and to organize its delivery jointly. This project chose not to subcontract to e-learning specialists the production of the material. That would have been easy and costly, but not collaborative. This project opted for staff from various universities to learn to e-teach, so that when the money from the EU funding runs dry, the know-how is in house at each of the member universities to continue to be used with the collaborative spirit fostered during the lifetime of the project. The staff involved in Hook Up! is not producing hundreds, thousands of pages which may be read by 10 staff in each university on how to ensure quality or how to motivate students to learn languages. Their approach is more immediate: learning by doing. Campus Europae has very short deadlines to meet the goal and raison d’être of Hook up! which is to have a student speaking a new foreign language at a sufficient level to follow academic courses abroad, to help the student take full advantage of what is being offered at the host university and to help the student stay in touch with the culture which is now part of themselves upon returning to the home university. The project is at present only a  grass-root movement coordinated by the European University Foundation, however only 6 months after the start of the project it started delivering language courses (not without hiccups) and  many of the CE movers 2009-10 hooked into foreign language e-learning.

cenews_nov_01

Image 1: 2009/2010 CE movers participation in Hook Up

Hook Up intends to offer tuition at A1, A2 and B1 level in 12 languages - certainly not English – although English is used as the lingua franca to communicate instructions and explanations to all linguistically diverse students. Almost half of the languages offered are “less widely spoken languages”; this means that without Hook Up!, the student would probably not have a chance to start learning the language at the home university.  This also means that the home university is de facto receiving a service from another university at no cost as its students have access to languages not taught at the university. At European level, this means that Hook Up! is not only promoting these less taught languages, it is offering a medium to convert them into “proximity” languages at very little cost.  At present, Hook Up! has the following language modules and levels in its Moodle (http://languagelearning.campuseuropae.org):

cenews_nov_03

Image 2: languages taught through Hook Up

The interactive courses lasting 3 months using voice and video are linked to the flow of CE movers. Come February, after the exams, the B1 level courses will start, soon joined in spring by the A1 and A2 courses once the students express their intention to go abroad within the Campus Europae programme. The number of courses depends on the numbers of CE movers but potentially, with the help of online teacher assistants, a ratio of 10-15 students per class should be the standard.

Side effects of Hook Up!

Often when implementing a project, careful attention needs to be given to involuntary results. However, it seems that at present, Hook up!’s side effects are rather positive: some staff have been bitten by the language learning bug and have asked to be registered as students in the Moodle; other universities and non universities are interested in the project as they see scope for a similar approach targeted to other publics; non CE movers have asked access to the Moodle; teachers are using it as part of their face to face courses and more students feel confident that they can apply to go to Lithuania or Latvia knowing that language tuition can start early enough.  So, besides contributing to developing new skills amongst the staff and the students, including lifelong learning and ICT, Hook up! will have an impact on student exchange flows hopefully increasing the number of incoming students to those universities and countries otherwise marginalized by the barrier represented by their less widely taught languages.

So, how can you Hook up!?

There are various ways to Hook Up!.

As a potential CE mover, let the CE Coordinators know already now of your intentions and inform them of your level in the language of the host university. (And if your level is inexistent, then why not go for a university of the “less widely spoken” languages?) Once enrolled, access to the language module in the Moodle Hook up! will be given and you will be informed of the start of the interactive language courses. Not convinced? Then why not attend a “taster course” during a CE promotion day (check the newsletter for dates)?

cenews_nov_02

Image 3: self-estimated linguistic progress of CE movers following the first batch of courses with Hook Up!

If you are a CE mover, already abroad, discovering a new country, yet too immersed in the lingua franca to take full advantage of your stay abroad, Hook Up! can help you sacrifice some of your time in the comfort of home or the university library to pursue language learning… maybe you can even become a correspondent for Hook Up! providing practical information, course related and cultural savvy to next year’s newcomers? In return, you will help others who will remember how your practical tip enabled them to save money, to circumvent a problem or simply to better enjoy the host town. Within Hook up! there is a work package to assist students in preparing this information with the provision of a training course on video taking and editing and the loaning of the material to do so. Furthermore, why not hook others into learning your language? You can participate in the “Taster courses” presenting your language and culture to other students at your host university. Or if now you are back at your home university and only have memories of your host university, why not incite others to do as you did? Show them during the “Taster courses” how you can now speak another language, how you can now have access to inside information when you read newspapers in Russian, Finnish... how you have broadened your own life and mind and how you can do it all over again! Another possibility to join the project but from a different angle, is that of assisting with the teaching. You might be engaged in studies relating to the language of your home university, would obtaining practical experience in online teaching be a plus for you? Maybe you have already done your course training in a face to face environment and are convinced that e-learning can give you an edge when finding a job? Hooking up with Hook Up! for a recognized traineeship may be around the corner as well as an opportunity to learn new skills.

As a member of staff in one of the universities of EUF-CE, why not start communicating with your colleagues with whom you do business in their own language? Or if you don’t do business, but love their country and visit it often, why not take advantage of this possibility and embark into lifelong learning? Maybe, it is not you, but a family member who would gain from learning another language? But maybe you don’t want to learn a language but use the approach taken by Hook Up! to start a collaborative project, a new course maybe taught with the contribution of lecturers from various campuses? Or maybe you are in charge of promoting your university beyond European borders, yet the language barrier keeps on popping up and you are not receiving the students you would like, why couldn’t Hook Up! be the solution to assist prospective international students in learning the language?

Having started the second year of implementation of Hook up! with a working session in Aveiro on 25th – 27th October where two representatives from the Education, Culture and Audiovisual Agency paid a visit, the auspices are encouraging. There are very few days in a year and there are still many hitches and many skills to be learnt in order to collaborate at a distance, but the students appreciate the efforts put into the project, hooking up is becoming fun and the online community is growing.

 

Fast facts

Outcomes of Humanities Subject Committee meeting in Aveiro

The Humanities and Social Sciences Subject Committee convened at the University of Aveiro on the 23rd and 24th of October. Participants from Finland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Serbia, Spain, Turkey and Portugal discussed the current situation of the committee and plans for the closest future. The subject committee’s work is progressing in compiling the matrices. In Tourism one more partner institution, European Humanities University, joined the group willing to exchange students in that area.  The members agreed to proceed in working on Languages, History, History of Art, Philosophy and Political Science/Public Administration.

cenews_nov_04

Image 4: the Humanities subject committee meeting, photo courtesy of Nina Szczygiel

Among the topics covered nwas also a grading question. The committee welcomed a speech of the President of EUF-CE, Prof. Estela Pereira, a specialist in grading conversions and recognition, followed by the discussion on how to guarantee that the system works in practice.

Some of the current Campus Europae movers staying in this academic year in Aveiro shared their experiences and opinions about the exchange and the most important challenges and outcomes.

The next meeting was scheduled for April 16th-17th 2010, at the University of Joensuu.

 

Furthering mobility in Natural Sciences

The Natural Sciences Subject Committee is wholeheartedly committed to the main idea of the EUF-CE project, which grounds on belief that only educated, multidimensional, curious, open-minded young people are truly able to create a better world. Moreover, to cherish that very world and enjoy living in it.

This Committee has been the integral part of the EUF-CE project from the very beginning, but with certain changes for the better enlargement wise. Initially, there were only the subgroups of Physics and Biochemistry study programmes, and then due to turning the good ear to students’ needs, the study programmes of Biology and Ecology were joined. Now, there exists a variety of possibilities to combine not only the courses and study programmes, but, to a certain extent, mix the study years and levels (meaning to allow e.g. master students to take up the courses valuable for their competences, but which are found at the bachelor levels at partner universities). The goal is to foster and support the mobility flow in every possible direction.

This is, in the first place, made possible by the very nature of the sciences existing in the Committee. Inter-, multi-, and trans-disciplinarity has become a conditio sine qua non for successful understanding and utilizing sciences. Furthermore, there’s the superb cooperation among the institutional coordinators in charge of the three main study programmes within the committee. Professors - academic coordinators stand as solid bridges connecting the universities and allowing the flow. Besides the attractiveness of the idea itself, it is these people who are the motivators, the sparkle that actually lights students’ fire to decide to spend a study period abroad, which is eventually a decision made solely by an individual student.

The Natural Sciences Subject Committee comprises the network of universities committed to EUF-CE, at this very moment the most active being: University of Aveiro (Portugal), University of Novi Sad (Serbia), University of Nancy 1 - Henri Poincare (France), St. Petersburg State University (Russia), Gazi University (Turkey), University of Trento (Italy). All of them are equally committed to EUF-CE milestones: adoption of a system of easily readable and comparable degrees, adoption of a system essentially based on undergraduate and graduate cycles, recognition of ECTS system, promoting the overall mobility and free movement by finding ways to overcome the obstacles, promoting the European cooperation in quality assurance thus enhancing the European dimension in higher education.

Apart from supporting these ideals in principle, the Committee is putting a lot of strength in making things work in practice. The important step towards successful recognition of study periods spent in the EUF-CE network, happened right here in the Natural Sciences branch. Joined efforts bore their fruits and were materialized through a document which lays down the procedure, appoints the responsible coordinators, and finally recognizes and validates the work undertaken while studying abroad. A well-though out, comprehensive, clear and fair document, transparent and achievable by all. Further steps are directed towards raising this document from the faculty/departmental level onto the university level thus making it work every time, everywhere and for everyone.

By respecting and believing in European tradition and freedom of science, the Natural Sciences Subject Committee strives to make its sciences accessible, available, applicable, transferable, and cherished in the world outside the university community. Our students are not only scientists-to-be specializing in Biology, Physics, Biochemistry… They are all-around persons, cosmopolitan individuals, well-educated, sophisticated, urbane, multilingual, multicultural, intelligent, and universally attractive. We are proud of the fact that EUF-CE moved past the 500 students milestone, and happy to be working for the future thousands of them.

 

Upcoming events

Student Council Plenary Meeting

Aveiro, 4-5 December 2009

Board of Directors Meeting

Luxembourg, 15 March 2010

 

The next Campus Europae newsletter is due for the 15th of December. To unsubscribe the Campus Europae newsletter please visit this link.