Disrupting formal higher education for a better future

Published on February 13, 2021.

Student teams leading the process, collaborating internationally, solving problems, and developing sustainable innovation solutions for contemporary challenges with ambition of fundamental social, environmental and economic impact! It is not another lecture on the future of education – it is a continuous joint journey of the University of Bergen (UiB), Vilniaus universitetas / Vilnius University, Université Jean Moulin (Lyon III) and Knowledge economy forum.

Currently, students’ teams participate in the second round of the internships (international student projects). Therefore, universities’ social innovation implementation framework will be ready for students to implement their progressive ideas at the end of the second round. Besides that, local project teams in each partner university are working on the recommendations and/or needed amendments for implementing international internships in everyday practice in their university to ensure the sustainability of internships after the end of the project.

The intellectual outputs are developed using an iterative model, meaning that firstly a draft version is being made. Then this draft is shared with other partners to gather comments and feedback and afterward is improved. It is expected that it would provide a better quality of the result that would be down to earth and applicable to other universities/organizations.

For now, the most significant impact is for universities that have built their know-how on implementing such a model of internship, including university employees working with an internship that has strengthened their competencies for providing needed support for students throughout such a novel internship process.

In addition to that, students who participated in the international team projects have gained experience on how to tackle real-life problems and the opportunity to collaborate with international students learned how to give and received feedback. This provides more flexibility for students to choose the most appropriate learning paths for them.