New Culture in Higher Education: Project-Oriented Learning Beyond Borders Erasmus Project

Project Title

New Culture in Higher Education: Project-Oriented Learning Beyond Borders

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 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation; Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

Motivated by the needs of today’s globalized European environment, the main objective of this project was to improve and enhance the learning process on sustainable engineering in university education through mobility and cross-border cooperation. The project consortium of the four engineering departments located at TU Berlin, PoliMI, NTNU and WUT, worked tagether on solutions aiming for sustainable innovations. ln doing so, two multidisciplinary, intercultural teams of a total 37 master’s students and 9 researchers, formed the so-called European Engineering Team (EET). The partner universities acted collectively to enhance and introduce innovations to the teaching and learning processes. Three main objectives have been pursued:
• To influence the career of students in their early phase by dealing with the challenge of sustainability in engineering processes
• To foster sustainable entrepreneurship and start-ups established by students
• To prepare students to thrive in and contribute to an increasingly demanding work-life in Europe
• by promoting the key skills required in the EU labour market
The partner universities developed and implemented a new course curriculum (lntellectual Output 1) for the EET, based on innovative teaching and learning approaches. An MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) about Sustainable Engineering (lntellectual Output 2) is an essential supplement to the EET by supporting the development of the required methodical- and professional-competencies of the master’s students. ln order to effectively disseminate the results of the project to internal and external stakeholders, a guideline for planning and implementing interdisciplinary and transnational teaching and learning activities (lntellectual Output 3) was also developed, including the necessary collaboration infrastructure.

The impact of the project starts at the local partner universities, through their master’s students, who are better prepared for the competitive European labour market and who aquire substantial knowledge about sustainable engineering and entrepreneurship. Regarding the long-term impact, the project strengthens the international profile of the partner universities. lt increases the interdisciplinary orientation of the European strategic partnerships of these universities by adding a new European joint study course to the curriculum. On the national and European Ievel, the developed course curriculum will increase the quality of teaching and learning in higher education by being disseminated to third-party universities, research institutes and companies. They can start to apply their own transnational project-oriented teaching activities. This will Iead to a competitive advantage of these European organizations in terms of attracting new students and creating more qualified future employees.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 393389 Eur

Project Coordinator

TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAT BERLIN & Country: DE

Project Partners

• NORGES TEKNISK-NATURVITENSKAPELIGE UNIVERSITET NTNU
• POLITECHNIKA WARSZAWSKA
• POLITECNICO DI MILANO