Building the Universities of the Future through Social Innovation Education Erasmus Project

Project Title

Building the Universities of the Future through Social Innovation Education

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Social entrepreneurship / social innovation; Civic engagement / responsible citizenship; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

To prepare students and universities to thrive in and make a positive contribution to today’s fast pacing world, higher education needs to shift from traditional teaching and learning to more innovative, entrepreneurial and collaborative practices. With the increasingly rapid change in higher education, such as the proliferation of online learning and students’ desire for action-oriented education and social impact careers, universities need to adapt their ways of teaching to stay relevant.

The EU agenda for Higher Education clearly highlights an increasing need for more entrepreneurial citizens and socially engaged people with European HEIs tackling future skills mismatches and contributing to innovation by supporting the cultivation of transversal skills; the agenda for the modernization of Europe’s higher education systems, calls for actions to stimulate entrepreneurship and innovation skills and foster HEIs connection with society. Finally, the New skills agenda for Europe emphasizes that to stimulate entrepreneurial mindsets and civic competences there is a great need to invest in the professional development of educators.

BUFSIE comes as a response to all that aiming towards building the universities of the future by assisting educators to firmly embed Social Innovation Education (SIE) into their culture and teaching practices and as an extension empower students with a mixture of social, entrepreneurial and active citizenship competences essential for thriving in the 21st century.SIE is a collaborative and collective educational model for empowering students to become the changemakers of tomorrow and is situated in the intersection of entrepreneurship education and active citizenship.

BUFSIE will thus scale up the novel educational pedagogy of SIE and transfer it to the higher education level, assisting in this way European HEIs to boost the social, entrepreneurial and civic competences of their students while at the same time, enhance teachers’ professional development by engaging them into an innovative set of teaching and learning activities. For that to be achieved, BUFSIE puts at its core the value creation approach, leveraging in this way the full potential of SIE whereby students from different academic disciplines are empowered and equipped with social and entrepreneurial competences developing thus a purpose that is conducive towards integrating and embedding SIE within HEIs following a value creation instead of a venture creation approach, where students learn to cooperate with each other towards collectively achieving common goals and driving change.

To this end, the project sets the following strategic objectives:

1. Develop a framework for transferring SIE to higher education combining what we identify as the two most important features of the changemaker of tomorrow, namely entrepreneurial spirit and socially proactive mindset. After extensive observation of existing frameworks, we have evaluated that such a framework is missing from the higher education context and wanted to fill in this gap by introducing the SIE model within different academic disciplines.

2. Create a training programme for HEIs teachers so as to support their professional development towards innovative teaching practices like SIE.

3. Develop a replication toolbox with handy guidelines and activities, enabling HEI teachers to practically implement SIE in their settings.

4. Develop a serious game for assisting HEIs educators to easily introduce SIE to their students and engage them in co-creation and change-making skills development by using an alternative game-based tool.

BUFSIE is a joint effort of 5 universities, involving departments from different academic disciplines, from SSH (UCY and UoM) to formal science (FAU-ILI, UB) and applied science departments (UNIZG) and 2 research organisations (Stimmuli, CSI) focusing on advancing the educational landscape and modernise Higher Education Institutions. BUFSIE wishes to become the gateway project for diffusing SIE in European HEIs and embed the change-making skills as part of the modernized curriculum at an EU level. On a long term basis, BUFSIE shall:

– strengthen employability and new professional paths by providing transversal skills and social innovation learning opportunities to students;

– go beyond teaching entrepreneurial competences in the narrow sense of the term and instead, equip and improve the practical skills of students in any field of activity and academic discipline;

– improve teachers’ professional development;

– foster new ways of effective collaboration among university-business-community and build sustainable partnerships towards integrating such collaborations in HEIs and also;

– enhance education by incorporating and integrating experiential, participatory and student-centered teaching and learning practices whereby the active and practical contribution of students is pivotal.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 359730 Eur

Project Coordinator

FRIEDRICH-ALEXANDER-UNIVERSITÄT ERLANGEN-NÜRNBERG & Country: DE

Project Partners

• UNIVERSITY OF MACEDONIA
• CSI CENTER FOR SOCIAL INNOVATION LTD
• SVEUCILISTE U ZAGREBU
• UNIVERSITY OF CYPRUS
• UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA
• STIMMULI FOR SOCIAL CHANGE