News

2009 has proven to be one of the most interesting years in the short history of Campus Europae. While 2008 main accomplishments concerned first and foremost infrastructural aspects such as the setting up of the European University Foundation as an umbrella organization for the network, the bestowing of degree-awarding power to Campus Europae by the Luxembourg Government and the launch of Hook Up!, 2009 allowed for developments with a more direct and positive impact in student exchange as such.

The first of such accomplishments concerns the work carried on by the subject committees. Academic cooperation is the raison d’être of Campus Europae and the objective of improving recognition standards has been at its heart since the first meetings. The subject committees fulfill both objectives by providing a venue where Professors from the member universities meet to discuss how student exchange can be best organized from a curricular viewpoint, and in March 2009 the largest meeting of such kind was organized, jointly with the Board of Directors. All subject committees convened in Luxembourg, discussing not only the further development of their work within the respective scientific domain but also deepening their understanding of each other’s experiences and choice of methodology while seeking to enhance interdisciplinary within CE. The March meeting also provided the first opportunity to discuss and agree on a strategy to publish online the outcomes of the work of the subject committees, so that students can easily retrieve information about academic equivalences while preparing their learning agreements before going abroad. Some curricula from Natural Sciences and Education and Teacher Training and are already available at matrices.campuseuropae.org, while more information from the Engineering and Law subject areas will be shortly available.

Another aspect that directly improves the experience of going abroad concerns language provisions, as more than 70% of the students moving with Campus Europae in 2009/2010 already used the Hook Up! language learning gateway for introductory courses in the language of their country of destination. The offer the language courses available at Hook Up! has since continued to expand both in terms of depth and languages available, which now encompass all used within the CE network.

Another very important development that arose in 2009 is a new and more ambitious operational paradigm for Campus Europae, aimed at improving the experience of studying abroad of all students moving within the member Universities for a full academic year, be it with respects to the possibilities for language learning, academic recognition, study-related internships or even being awarded a CE Degree.

Although this has been a largely positive year Campus Europae is not immune to the difficulties that are impacting student mobility in the context of the implementation of the Bologna Process, having exchanged fewer students in 2009 than in the previous year. This steams from the combination of shorter study cycles which are often designed in a fashion that does not lend itself to the integration of mobility “windows” and  the tendency from the national agencies to limit mobility grants to only one semester only, which puts significant constraints on students willing to spend longer periods abroad. To offset these trends Campus Europae will, in 2010, also focus on ways to improve the attractiveness of mobility, and already in the next days the CE coordinators in the member universities will receive new promotional materials aimed at fulfilling this objective.