Improving Employability through Internationalisation and Collaboration

The Project

The Bologna Process is the foundation for a European higher education area, focusing on a high degree of student mobility as a key to make higher education in Europe more attractive and competitive. To achieve this, students need to be well-trained in their fields but also acquire soft skills which are required on the labour market. EPIC develops innovative teaching formats and supports the cooperation between universities and companies in order to make university teaching more relevant to practice.

The project was carried out in three annual cycles. After each cycle, the material developed was adjusted and improved. Each year, students worked on case studies designed by companies. These could be seminar tasks or the students’ bachelor or master theses. The collaboration of at least two students from different European countries was organised mostly virtual.

The results of EPIC– guidelines, teaching materials as well as experiences from the project – are available as short eLearning tutorials.

EPIC is a follow-up of COLIBRI, an innovative blended-learning course, which promoted innovative teaching approaches in ICT.

Goals

EPIC aimed at improving employability of students, because the European labour market of tomorrow requires the skill to be able to work together internationally across disciplines. The universities’ curriculum will also be expanded to include practical applications and cooperation between industry and universities will be strengthened.

aconium responsibilities

aconium coordinated the development of teaching material for university staff to include problem-based learning into curricula and was responsible for the quality assurance of the project as a whole. Additionally, aconium provided case studies.