November 2022
The International Cooperation Framework for Next Generation Engineering Students (NextGEng) is a three-year Cooperation Partnership project, co-funded by the European Union under the Erasmus+ KA2 programme, which started at the beginning of October 2022 and will end in September 2025. The aim of NextGEng is to develop an international cooperation framework between consortium partners that promote international team-teaching with the support of new learning material and teaching methods that are aligned with the European Education Area 2025 and are in accordance with labor market needs. To achieve this end, the NextGEng project is based on three lines of action:
Tailored Training Process
At the beginning of the project, an initial training program for the teachers that participate in the project is organized. At the event, experts in innovation in pedagogy from different fields address novel teaching techniques and resources, that are to be adapted to engineering. These include cooperative team-teaching, student-centered approaches, and flexible assessment, framed within the modular organization of engineering courses.
International team-teaching (ITT) pilot program
The ITT pilot program supports the development of an international teaching framework where teachers and industry experts collaborate in the development of new course content and specific teaching methods for engineering. The updated courses integrate new student-centered elements that make use of experiential learning in close collaboration with real-life case studies from industry and address eco-friendly and specific digitalization engineering concepts. The new modules are designed so that could be easily delivered using blended methods in an international team-teaching environment where teachers and company experts from the consortium partners could interact and share their experiences with the students.
Cases for experiential learning (CEL) projects
CEL projects are project-based learning activities that are designed in collaboration with companies and HEIs research groups and aim to facilitate close cooperation between students, HEI staff, researchers, and industry experts on real-life industrial/research project topics. The aim is to strengthen the role of experiential learning in engineering by implementing actions of different natures and extent in courses and projects.
The Kick-off meeting
The Kick-off meeting of the NextGEng project will be organized at the University of Jaen in Jaen, Spain from Monday to Tuesday, November 28-29, 2022. This meeting will be the official start of the project and there will be present partners from all HEIs and companies from three countries.
Full partners
Technical University of Cluj Napoca (coordinator), Romania, www.utcluj.ro/en
Jamk University of Applied Sciences, Finland, www.jamk.fi
University of Jaen, Spain, www.uja.es
Integración Sensorial y Robótica (ISR), Spain, https://isr.es/main-dev-en/
Valmet Technologies Oyj, Finland, www.valmet.com
Robert Bosch SRL, Romania, www.bosch.ro/en