What does Civis mean for BIG?
The acronym Civis stands for the European Civic University Alliance, a collaboration between European universities that started in October 2019. There were eight universities that formed the alliance, among them Stockholm University. Now the alliance has grown to include eleven universities with a total of almost 600,000 students and employees. The universities that are part of the alliance are listed at the end of this article.
The aim of Civis is to "facilitate collaborations across national borders and to increase the mobility of students, teachers and other staff". The collaboration should also "contribute to strengthening the sense of belonging in Europe, increasing knowledge and understanding of different cultures and languages, as well as promoting the attractiveness and competitiveness of European universities".
The alliance is financially supported by the EU program Erasmus+, but also involves costs for the participating universities (two of the Civis universities are located in countries that are not part of the EU and those universities have to cover the resources themselves).
Civis meeting at BIG
What does Civis mean in practice and for the individual institution? BIG wanted to find out and invited Stefan Nordlund to a meeting. Stefan, who is a professor of biochemistry, has long been involved in Civis and, among other things, represented SU in the steering committee. BIG's meeting was held in the middle of November and everyone in the staff listened with interest when Stefan talked about what is happening in Civis and what he hopes it will lead to in the future.
Student exchange
One aspect of the collaboration that BIG has already noticed is the student exchange. This fall semester we have seventeen Civis students on our courses. The largest group comes from Madrid and the second largest group from Aix-Marseille. But we also have some incoming students from Tübingen and Bucharest. Many of those who started HT22 have extended their studies to VT23. Unfortunately, we have not yet sent out any students within the Civis collaboration.
The student exchange within Civis does not really differ from the exchange within other central agreements. The uniqueness of Civis is instead about the possibility of providing joint training, and this is something that is still under development.
New joint educations
The requirement for receiving support from Erasmus+ to develop new educations is that at least three Civis universities form a "strategic partnership" and cooperate. The development work is carried out in something called "hubs" where they try to create "challenge-based" educations with interdisciplinary themes and global relevance. There are now five hubs and they have the following themes: Climate, Environment and Energy, Society, Cultures and Heritage, Health, Cities, Territories and Mobility and Digital and Technological Transformations.
SU investing in Hub 1
Stockholm University considers the work of the hubs to be the most important part of Civis and took early responsibility for Hub 1, a responsibility that is now shared with Glasgow University. Hub 1 was also the hub that was established first and there the development work has come the furthest. The chairman of Hub 1 is Professor Alasdair Skelton at the Department of Geological Sciences, and under his leadership a new master's program in the area of Climate, Environment and Energy is now being developed. The partnership requirement is met with flying colours, as it is planned that all eleven universities will participate in the new programme. It is not intended only for natural scientists, but addresses a wider circle. The program is supposed to be launched in 2024 and will begin with a MOOC, i.e. an open online course, which has already been completed. Work is now underway to develop subsequent courses.
Stefan emphasizes that there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of administration and student mobility. The education must be quality assured and many different regulatory obstacles at national level must be overcome. At the same time, Stefan emphasizes that the cooperation within Civis can, in the best case, create educations of higher quality or with special combinations that a single university cannot offer. Such a Civis program can thus give the student a completely unique competence.
Other possibilities in Civis
Civis also provides opportunities for many other forms of collaboration, such as teacher mobility (teaching assignments) and staff training (job shadowing), development of teaching methods, improved language skills and research collaborations. Civis also aims to develop cooperation with other universities, above all in the Mediterranean area and in Africa.
What should we do at BIG?
And so to the most important question for BIG's staff: what does Civis mean for us? What can we do at the institution? Inform the students about what Civis offers, Stefan replies. And think through what can be credited in the Swedish education.
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The following universities are included in Civis, in addition to Stockholm University: Aix-Marseille Université (France), National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece), University of Bucharest (Romania), Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain) ), Sapienza Università di Roma (Italy), Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (Germany), University of Glasgow (Great Britain), Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg (Austria) and Université de Lausanne (Switzerland).
Last updated: December 13, 2022
Source: Margareta Ohné