U!REKA Inclusive and Connected Campus kicked off

U!REKA European University colleagues had a successful two-day workshop in Helsinki. The workshop engaged the partners’ IT specialists and other professionals to brainstorm, discuss and map the next steps on preparing the alliance’s joint inter-university campus.

Inter-university campuses are a shared goal for all European University alliances. As for U!REKA, inclusivity is one of its core values, and the alliance will therefore open its campus with various study opportunities to both students and life-long learners. U!REKA’s inter-university campus is titled Inclusive and Connected Campus, and it will be opened online by the end of 2025, with its focus on green and digital competences.

In the process of preparing and designing the inter-university campus, the alliance has introduced a multidisciplinary approach, and experts of different fields have collaborated with one another from the very beginning. The alliance has collected experiences and expectations from future users of the campus: learners, teachers, researchers and administrative staff members as well as external stakeholders.
Besides working on the campus preparations online, colleagues have considered it important to have interactive workshops face-to-face. Manager Niina Huovinen, who works as the Institutional Coordinator of Metropolia University of Applied Sciences to U!REKA and was responsible for organising the workshop in Helsinki, emphasises the importance of participatory workshop methods.

“When you ask colleagues to travel long distances to meet face to face, you have to make it worthwhile and ensure that the event delivers something extra that cannot be achieved online. We wanted to organise an event where people are present and focused, so that it facilitates both efficient work towards achieving results as well as experts getting to know each other”, tells Niina.

Leaving laptops aside and working together on a collaborative wall turned out to be very productive and the workshop room was filled with fruitful conversations.

Successful campus preparations require collaboration not only among U!REKA partners but also with other networks working on similar goals. Each partner attending the workshop has previously had benchmarking discussions with other European University alliances on what kind of good practices they have utilised when preparing their inter-university campuses, and the results of these discussions were now shared with the workshop participants.

Besides other alliances, national collaboration projects are also a great source of experiences and inspiration. As part of the workshop, U!REKA colleagues met the project staff of the Digivisio 2030 programme that develops new services to support the transition to the future of learning in Finland, by paying attention to and collaborating with the European level programs available.

After the workshop, U!REKA’s IT and other experts will continue to work together both online and face-to-face to create the inter-university campus roadmap and then its implementation.