First steps towards a CHARM-EU powered course collaboration
Sharing a course setup with other teachers takes some coordination. You have to get them interested in your course, have to show them how the course is set up, and then start to collaborate. Luckily, CHARM-EU is here to help with all of this.
On the 19th and 20th of September, the CHARM-EU team of Utrecht University welcomed interested teams from Eötvös Loránd University, Universitat de Barcelona and Université de Montpellier, to a working session that was organized to meet the Living pasts team from Universiteit Utrecht and explore the future of a collaboration on a course between these universities: the Living pasts, exploring futures. This course is known as an innovative one that features challenge-based, transdisciplinary and community-engaged learning, all together while being a co-creation with the students.
Why the Living pasts, Exploring futures?
In the Living pasts, exploring futures course students work in multi-disciplinary teams and dive into the cultural and natural heritage, ecology, social dynamics and healthy urban living of a certain location within the city of Utrecht. Together with stakeholders such as the municipality and the Utrecht Archives, the students deliver proof of concepts and prototypes of their team’s findings, such as visual novels, documentaries, VR experiences or escape rooms. All of these products that are developed during the course, feed into the Utrecht Time Machine project (http://utrechttimemachine.nl/).
The innovativeness of the course, the subject matter, and collaboration with the Time Machine initiative, makes the Living pasts course a great case to be shared amongst European partner universities. All to end up with a pan-European transdisciplinary course giving students the possibility to explore the past and future of multiple cities.
Sharing courses between alliance partners
CHARM-EU is an Erasmus+ funded initiative which aims to develop long term structural and strategic cooperation between European universities. Nine European institutions are part of CHARM-EU, including Utrecht University. CHARM-EU represents a Challenge-Driven, Accessible, Research-based, and Mobile model for the co-creation of a European University aligned with the European Values and the Sustainable Development Goals.
In order to foster this long term structural cooperation, sharing courses between the alliance members is a natural progression of the project. Furthermore, the purpose of the network is also to share experiences with educational innovations, such as the Living pasts, Exploring futures course is.
Before us lie endless possibilities
During this working session at Utrecht University, the Living pasts design was shared in an interactive discussion with the Living pasts team in Utrecht, and shown by attending of one of the classes. The other teacher teams then went on to envision and design the Living pasts course at their own university.
So what does the future hold? After these two fruitful days, the other teacher teams will further the development of the Living pasts course at their own university in collaboration with the team from Utrecht, while being supported by CHARM-EU.
Interested in sharing your innovative course with others in the CHARM-EU alliance, contact us at: charm@uu.nl