Author: Niels Hexspoor

Student Event: Aurora Care and Compassion

The Aurora Student Council is delighted to be hosting the Aurora Care and Compassion Student event. This free virtual conference for students across all Aurora Universities is packed with engaging content to show students how Aurora cares for issues in modern society. The event will get students involved in activities and conversation across 4 key areas. These areas are Mental Health and Wellbeing, Open Educational Resources, Celebrating and Promoting Diversity, and Sustainability. Students’ participation in these activities and conversations will give them practical skills to take away and also help Aurora embed student voice into the heart of many exciting projects. We want students to learn about Aurora and equip them with the tools to champion Aurora’s values in their own universities.

The Aurora Spring Academic meeting will be hosted on the Gatherly platform, allowing you to freely move and chat with participants in groups of two or three or more.

If you are a student interested in any of these topics or you know of students that would be interested, click the link here to register your interest and come and join us on March 30th 2021.

Contribute to the Aurora community discussion regarding mental health using our hashtag,  #AuroraAllianceEU.  

 

More information about the program and schedule can be found below: 

Care & Compassion Programme

The sessions will occur twice in the day, giving participants ample opportunities to follow one of choice. A brief description follows below:

Isabel Ponce-Grosso // Introduction to Mindfulness // Mental Health and Wellbeing

This Mindfulness Introduction webinar is suitable for beginners and will cover some theoretical basics and discussion, followed by a guided meditation. It will also include tips to apply these skills into everyday life to help participants with their emotional wellbeing. They will also be directed to further available courses and resources if they wish to continue developing a mindfulness practice. 

Sylvia Moes & Anke Petschenka // Making OER possible – Raising awareness in the Aurora network // Open Educational Resources

Sylvia Moes & Anke Petschenka will introduce you to the world of Open Educational Resources on an international level. The session intends to explain the added values of OER and Open Education, the benefits for students, and how co-creation between staff members of Aurora and students takes place. The session ends with a discussion and sharing experiences.

Rodrigo Zapata // Be a Sustainability Leader today! // Sustainability

In this session titled: “Do you want to become someone who inspires and support action towards a better and sustainable world?” Rodrigo Zapata sheds light on several facets of embracing leadership in sustainability. Participants will gain insight on a) who a sustainable leader is, b) why and how anyone can become one, and c) surprising facts about leadership and sustainability. Rodrigo will also share a case study of the Go Movement and GOVU.

Jumara Stone // Unconscious Bias and Privilege // Celebrating and Promoting Diversity

We will be exploring the themes around bias and privilege that each of us holds in different ways. The session will introduce what an unconscious bias is, how we can look out for it, and why we use this bias. We will then focus on the privilege we have as individuals and how this enables us to move forward in life, more so than others. The session will end, focusing on being aware of such bias and privilege when we use our voice to support others.

Aurora Spring Academic Meeting

Meet peers facing similar challenges in providing students with high-quality education and with international opportunities in a forced online environment.

Learn what support Aurora is organising to assist academic teachers in meeting these challenges.

On March 30th, from 9 am to 1 pm (CET), Aurora is hosting its Spring Academic meeting. It will be a platform to meet with peers and discuss how to provide high-quality learning under the currently restricted conditions.

The Aurora Spring Academic meeting is a follow-up to the Aurora Community building event of January 28th, 2019, focusing on the same domains.

The Spring meeting is an event in the Aurora Alliance European University programme, which aims to strengthen the way in which Aurora students are equipped with the skills and mind-sets to act as social entrepreneurs and innovators in addressing societal problems.

The Event

The Spring Academic meeting aims at academic who feel attached to the following domains:

  1. Sustainability & Climate Change
  2. Digital Society & Global Citizenship
  3. Health & Well-being
  4. Culture: Diversity & Identity
  5. Social Entrepreneurship & Innovation.

The Spring event is organised mostly in parallel strands for each of the domains to meet. There will be ample time in the programme to freely discuss topics of mutual interest – in education, research, or otherwise. The core of the programme will be sessions on two key challenges in higher education with the current restrictions:

  • How are we as academic teachers finding our way from high-quality analogue (or offline) to digital (or online) education,
  • How can we continue to provide our students with a meaningful international experience, particularly in the pandemic and post-pandemic context,

Topics and tools

The Aurora Spring Academic event is an excellent opportunity to find out how your university’s participation in Aurora can be valuable to you: as a platform to meet with peers, find out how you can learn from and with each other, learn about the tools Aurora is developing to support the member universities in providing academically excellent and societally relevant education.

In the sessions, you will have the opportunity to discuss what you see as the most pressing issues in these two key challenges – and how these can be addressed.

With the maintenance of quality in virtual education, there will be specific attention to higher education’s value beyond the subject-related knowledge and skills.

With continued international dimensions with less physical mobility, there will be specific attention on tools and platforms for virtual mobility and online joint courses. Please take a look at the table below for the full proposed schedule:

Spring Academic Meeting Programme
Proposed Programme

The Aurora Spring Academic event will be hosted on the Gatherly platform, which allows you to freely move and chat with participants in groups of two’s or three’s or more.

Info-desks

Before and after the sessions, you may visit info desks on the various tools and platforms developed in the Aurora European University Alliance programme; see below under the programme description.

You can stop by the info desks of your interest and get in touch with the colleagues involved.

Take-aways

So what can you expect as takeaways from this event?

  1. Meet, discuss and arrange follow-up contact with peers on your issues and concerns in the transit from analogue to high-quality digital education and/or students’ international opportunities
  2. Find out about existing good practices in high-quality digital education and virtual international experience
  3. Learn about useful Aurora tools and platforms for these challenges and meet the experts who can help you use them.

To register for the Aurora Spring Academic Meeting, please sign up here

Follow this page for more updates on the event. A pdf containing the full program for the event can be found using the following link: Aurora Spring Academic Meeting – Moving from Analogue to Digital with Quality- How Do We Do That

 

Aurora Alliance Newsletter #01

The Aurora Alliance has released its first newsletter at the beginning of 2021. Take a look at the newsletter for a comprehensive update on the latest developments in the Aurora Alliance, discussing for example what is happening in Aurora, the Aurora Pilot Domains, and upcoming events across the Alliance.

Next to that, the newsletter contains interesting blogs, columns, and profiles, created by the active and engaged Aurora Community.

You can read the newsletter here.

Want to stay updated, and be among the first to read about the latest Aurora developments? Why not subscribe to the newsletter!