Enlight European University Kick-off Week

The European Universities programme works to develop a European university system that makes Europe more attractive for education, research and innovation. The goal is to create deeper strategic collaborations between European universities to tackle Europe’s societal challenges of tomorrow. The initiative is linked to a larger development effort within European higher education for 2025. By participating in the Enlight project, Uppsala University becomes one of 11 Swedish higher education institutions included in one of the 41 projects with close to 280 higher education institutions throughout Europe.

Improve quality, inclusion and competitiveness

The Enlight programme is designed to increase mobility for students, researchers, teachers and other staff within the consortium’s universities and to improve quality, inclusion and competitiveness in European higher education. The goal for 2050 is for a student to be able to easily move and study at all the included universities during their education and then be able to graduate.

Enlight’s challenge-based approach brings together the universities’ resources within five global challenges:

• Health and well-being
• Digital revolution and impact of digitalisation
• Climate change
• Energy and the circular economy
• Equity

Each university collaborates with its region to formulate how each challenge will be tackled. The idea is to start from each university’s regional context and build on what is already in place to achieve sustainable forms of collaboration. Uppsala and the region will be important partners for Uppsala University in this work, where the University will have particular responsibility for the challenges of climate change and equity.

Kick-off week 1–5 March

The project is shifting now from words to actions. A joint digital kick-off week will be held 1-5 March, where there will be several presentations on Enlight, the five challenges and examples of activities that students can participate in. Parts of the programme are also open to students, teachers, researchers, staff and other interested parties who would like to learn more about Enlight and the European Universities Programme.

“The kick-off will bring together for the first time all stakeholders from all the subprojects at the nine universities,” says Jonathan Schalk, project manager for Enlight at Uppsala University. “We will present more details on what Enlight is and how students, teachers, researchers, and local and regional partners can contribute to developing and testing different formats for challenge-based teaching. Some of the programme is also open to the public, such as the presentations on each flagship challenge and the showcase presentations, which discuss activities already open for students to participate in.”

Organising discussions

In the future, discussions will be organised between Uppsala University and local external stakeholders.

“Each autumn, Enlight will also arrange a local event in Uppsala and Visby called Regional Academy Demo Days,” explains Schalk. “The purpose is to bring together the University, local and regional stakeholders, students and the public to discuss the five flagship challenges and look at different education concepts.”