 Hello everybody. Thank you for your joining to this EDEN webinar. This EDEN webinar we talk about new international mobility perspectives and challenges for the rising European campuses. So really welcome to all the participants, welcome to all the attendees and to all the presenters that wanted to share with us their experience in the field. As you can understand the topic of mobility and European campuses is really a great challenge for the future, a great idea in order to build a better Europe for the future. And we really think together with a lot of people around us that this will be a beautiful tools, a beautiful methodologies to involve students, universities and cultural world in order to create an inclusive world and to create new methodologies for the curriculum of the students of their possibility to be more European in the world. So we have here in this webinar experts coming from different universities, coming from the topic of internationalization and culture and academic field. And I am starting this webinar as moderator. My name is Elena Calderola from University of Pavia, Italy, and at the present I am the director of the e-learning center of this university. But here with us today are Professor Dorotty Kelly from University of Granada, Professor Ignacio Blanco from University of Granada as well, Antonella Forlino from University of Pavia and Liliana Moreira from University of Coimbra, Portugal. I would like to introduce Professor, first of all, Professor Dorotty Kelly. Dorotty Kelly is Professor of Translation at the University of Granada, Spain, and is vice-rector for internationalization at the same university since 2008. And she covered a very important role as chair of the executive board of the Coimbra group of universities from 2010 until 2017, and member of Spain's national Bologna expert teams from 2010 to 2013. She has really a great experience in the field of internationalization, in the field of rising European campuses, because she was directly in touch with the European Commission, with the main institution of Europe, thinking about this new way to conceive mobility and the creation of curricula of the student. So as a first presenter, I would like to leave her the floor in order to ask her to share with us her experience in this field. Please Dorotty, the floor is yours. Thank you very much Elena for that introduction and presentation. And thank you very much for the invitation to join this panel. It is a very, very great pleasure for me to join the panel with you, and to join the panel with colleagues like Antonela from Pavia, Liliana from Coimbra, and of course Nacho from my own university here in Granada. I think the panel is going to be a very, very good overview of just how important mobility and internationalization in more general terms is for Coimbra group universities represented on members of the Coimbra group, and much of their experience in mobility and internationalization stems precisely from belonging to that very first university network which was set up way back in 1985. Unlike my colleagues, I am not going to use a PowerPoint presentation because I would like to use my time simply to offer a few reflections in an attempt to frame some of the issues, which I am sure my colleagues will then look at in more depth in their presentations. And I would like to spend the first part of my presentation looking at this whole idea of new international mobility perspectives, and then to move on briefly to the challenges for raising European campuses, European universities, initiatives we are all heavily involved in at this time. Mobility has always been a part of my personal and professional life, and so is an issue very, very dear to my heart. And the European universities initiative is, I believe, a very, very exciting and inspiring new opportunity for those of us who believe so strongly in internationalization. To move forward, perhaps to move forward a little bit faster than we were managing to move forward under the European higher education area. And I think many of us felt that perhaps the process, the European higher education area and the Bologna process had somehow not moved forward as fast and as efficiently as we would have liked it to. And so now we have, I think, a renewed opportunity to move forward and improve, improve the quality and improve the depth and breadth of the experience which we can offer to our students. I'd like to start my reflections on mobility, saying that of course mobility is something which has been discussed a very great deal since the pandemic struck in the month of March. And there has been a great deal of debate and discussion about new forms of mobility, about new ways of looking at mobility, and it almost seems as if this reflection has happened because of the pandemic. But I would like to take a step back and say, of course, as we all know, the debate on mobility has been around for quite some time. And in fact, if I would like to take us back to the end of the 1990s, when the movement for internationalisation at home, or perhaps with nuances and other names, internationalisation of the curriculum, internationalisation of the campus, comprehensive internationalisation, internationalisation for all, very, very importantly came on the scene and questioned, questioned a lot of what had been done in international relations up to then because it was so heavily based on physical mobility for what were seen or who were seen as a privileged view. And I think that is an important point to take. So from an inclusion perspective, if we look at the European higher education area, we will remember, of course, that for 2020, we had a target of 20% of our graduates having had a significant international experience during their studies. A target which in the whole of the European higher education area has not been met. A target which I have no doubt when the ministers meet in Rome later this month, in Rome or virtually later this month, to see how the European higher education area is moving forward. They will no doubt lament once again, that we are not moving forward in this target as quickly as would have been desirable. And even if we had met that 20% target, it is perhaps important to note that if only 20% of our graduates are having a significant international experience, it means that 80% are not. And 80% is a very large percentage of our graduating students. And this is in fact one of the reasons why in the field of internationalisation there has been a movement since the end of the 1990s to point out that while physical mobility, while outgoing physical mobility is a wonderful experience at a level of personal development, academic development, language, cultural development and professional development, it is by no means the only way to internationalise our activity and should not be the only way to internationalise our activity. So in relation to that perhaps a few general reflections. The first, that there does always seem to be an excessive concentration on outgoing mobility for our institutions. We very often seem to forget about the enormous value of incoming student mobility, both credit mobility, that is temporary mobility, and degree seeking mobility, incoming international students seeking a full degree at our university. Now, why do I believe that incoming mobility is so important for internationalisation? And why do I believe it is an important new perspective on mobility? That is because it is these incoming international students who will help us to create an international campus, who will help us to create international learning spaces, physical learning spaces in the first instance on our campuses for all. Including that 80% of students who will not have an outgoing mobility experience themselves. Just a quick word on that point, and that is of course that the value of incoming mobility for internationalisation for all is not something that just happens. But like any policy in internationalisation, and if we take the definition of David, Egram Pollack, Howard and Hunter, which many of us use for internationalisation, internationalisation must be an intentional policy. And therefore it is up to us as institutions to make intentional use of that incoming mobility in order to internationalise the experience for all of our students. The second reflection here is on the value of staff mobility. And again, here, very often, we have an, I think probably an over dependence on student mobility, and we forget that staff mobility has a huge additional value, a huge added value for internationalising learning and teaching for all. And when I say staff mobility here, it can be physical, but of course it doesn't have to be physical. The participation of international staff in teaching and learning activities from a distance or with physical presence is a huge added value. So another new perspective, which I believe needs to be brought into the debate on mobility in general. And then a few words on what I know is probably an area which is of great interest to this particular forum. And that is what has been termed virtual mobility, not a term I like myself. I prefer, I much prefer virtual exchange. And just a few words here because there has been, and I believe there is a risk of assuming that because during the pandemic, we have all been able to attend to look after, to assist our international students online. There has been a tendency to say, well, that's it. Now we know how to do this virtual mobility, and we don't really need the physical mobility anymore. I think there is a huge distance, a huge gap between what we have been doing these months as an emergency response to the pandemic. And what is truly online, digitally enhanced, digitally based learning on the one hand. And what is of course true virtual exchange on the other. And again here, there is an issue of course of intentionality. In order for virtual exchange to be quality, virtual exchange and to have a positive impact on our students learning and on their internationalization, the methodology has to be intentional. And the activities have to be designed intentional as internationalization. I'm thinking of methodologies such as Coil, which I'm sure many of you are very, very familiar with collaborative online international learning and so on. And just a few words of optimism with regards to the future. If we look at a combination of all of these kinds of mobility and all of these perspectives, maintaining outgoing physical mobility where possible, maintaining an intentional use of incoming mobility to internationalize the experience at our own campuses, involving staff mobility very, very clearly and intentionally in our strategies, designing virtual exchange as intentional internationalization, then I believe that we can with a combination of all of these different kinds of mobility truly begin to offer internationalization for all. I think the new Erasmus program offers us some new opportunities, which we did not have before. In the form of what they have turned for the new program blended mobility, not what we're doing this year again as an emergency response to the pandemic, but rather collaboratively designed virtual exchange with a short physical mobility of between five and 30 days, together with prior or post virtual exchange. And I think this is a very, very promising move forward and very promising new approach from the Erasmus program together with other flexible approaches from the Erasmus program to short term mobility to flexibility in destinations, not limited exclusively to program countries and so on and so forth. There are some very, very interesting reflections on all of these issues in a recent Coimbra group paper, which I would urge you all to read. And I know that my colleague, Nacho, when he speaks will also look at many of these issues from the perspective of Arcus, the European University Alliance, which I have the privilege to coordinate. And let me use that as a brief bridge into the second part of the title of the panel. And that is the challenges in setting up European universities and just a few very brief words. The only qualitative objective in the whole of the call for European universities has been the 50% of students benefiting from mobility within the alliances. By 2025, and this is clearly, if we think about the 20% target and how we have not reached it yet, this is clearly a huge challenge. And I know that all of the alliances, both those passed in the first round in 2019 and those approved in the second round in 2020, have been looking very, very carefully. First of all, what this means. And I think it is couched in some very, very interesting terms because it doesn't say 50% of students participating in mobility, but 50% of students benefiting from mobility. And I think that is a very, very interesting perspective. I think it is much more an internationalization at home perspective than the traditional physical mobility for all approach, which has marked the Erasmus program since the beginning. Within the Arcus Alliance, and I know as I said, Natya will come back to more details on this, we have set up a Pathfinder group to explore exactly what benefiting from mobility can mean, and exactly what mobility can mean in 2020 and in the future. And just a very brief word on the impact of the pandemic since we're talking about challenges for the setting of European campuses. And I think it is obvious that the timing of the pandemic could not have been worse for this initiative, because it came six months into the first round and six months before the second round of alliances selected, were able to start their work program. So clearly has had a very, very strong impact on the work program and on work programs, which were very often very much based on mobility, because the idea itself, as Elina said in her introduction, was that students should be able to move with great freedom. And I'm just a final reflection on the challenges, and that is that while, of course, we can use technology to move forward in many, many, many activities in many parts of our work program, and you're going to see some examples in this panel, I know some very interesting examples. I think it is also true that we are all missing the in-person networking opportunities, which are so essential to developing the knowledge and trust, which we need in order to develop these alliances. In particular in the Arcus Alliance, one of the big challenges we had is that we have not been able to hold our first annual conference. We had designed an annual conference every year where we could bring together staff, both academic staff, research staff, and administrative staff working on articles together with students and doctoral candidates working in the Alliance activities, bring them all together once a year in order to promote that sense of belonging. And that conference was planned for March 2020. Of course, we were unable to hold that conference. And although we have held a plethora of online meetings covering various different aspects of our activity, I think we do all still miss that in-person contact as a basis from which to grow. And that, of course, also has to do with mobility and with mobility perspectives. And I think with that I'll bring my initial reflections to a close, because I know my colleagues will now look at some more specific aspects of what they're doing in their universities and in their alliances, and then perhaps we can come back to some of the issues in the question and answer. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dorothy, for this really insightful presentation. For the future, the problems, the challenges. Just, I would like just in a very, very short moment to highlight some points, I particularly like your presentation, some specific concept inclusion. And incoming students can transform the campus in an international campus, and this is true. The physical presence, the importance of the in-person and physical presence and relations are strongly filled and share with you the same feelings. But the idea about to think and rethink about a combination and balancing of new tools and methodologies in order to take the best of a lot of tools, a lot of possibilities that we have around, and to achieve the higher level of inclusion for all the students in Europe. From my side, I want to highlight you in question and answer three questions from a student, from a participant, Almu Hanat. Sorry if I, maybe I am not pronouncing correctly your name. And can you read maybe the question, Dorothy, anyway? I can read quickly. Yeah. Okay, if you can give an answer or give your opinion, okay, I give you the floor. Sure. Thank you very much, Elina. Yes, very, very briefly. The first question from Almu Hanat. Again, my apologies for pronunciation also. Why do we gather all our universities under one perfect system to share different views? Well, I think experiences shown us that one perfect system is very, very hard to achieve. I think that meetings such as this and alliances such as the small university, European university alliances or larger alliances such as the Coimbra Group Network or larger associations such as the EUA, speaking in European terms, do a great deal to bring together universities to discuss them, to debate ways in which we can move forward. And I think that does happen. However, I'm afraid I'm not sure we will ever manage to bring all our universities together under one perfect system. I very much doubt that that. I very much doubt, in fact, that it is necessarily even desirable because I think that different parts of the world, and you yourself mentioned East Asia, for example, later on, have very, very different higher education cultures. And I don't think we necessarily all want to share one system and one higher education culture. Of course, however, what we do need to do is learn from one another. As you point out in your third question, why do European universities not deal with East Asia universities like Japan and China to learn from their experiences? We do. I think all universities represented here work with East Asia universities in both Japan and in China. I think we learn from them. I think we share experiences with them. In fact, I think that that is one of the things that universities have been doing very, very well over the past decades. International relations have grown and that has allowed us to learn one from another. And I think that's been very, very positive. And then the third question. Online learning the disadvantages that face scholars in producing practical learning. I think there are a whole series and many, many of the participants at this event are much more expert in the field of online learning than I am myself. But can I say, I think one of the risks is simply to assume that what we do in an in-person context can be done automatically online and that it will work. I think there is, again, a very, very clear need for intentionality in the design, which needs to take on board where the teaching and learning is to take place. I think Elena was that. Yes. My colleagues. Yes, of course. Thank you very much. Thank you for your answers. And I think now is the time to go more in depth in specific project and the European alliances. So we have here in the webinar two examples of European alliances. The first one is a C2U and the University of Pavia takes part in this. The second one is Arcus World University of Granada, played a role of coordinator. So I would like to give the floor to Professor Antonella Forrino, who is the Director for International Affairs at the University of Pavia and coordinator for this University of European alliances, a C2U. Antonella is Associate Professor of Biochemistry in the Department of Molecular Medicine. She has a PhD in biochemistry and speciality in genetics and spent five years of post-doc training in National Institutes of Health in USA. Antonella was one of the, maybe the person who coordinate the effort of the University of Pavia together with other six universities in order to achieve the result of the European alliances C2U. So now we are here with Antonella to know the specificity, the peculiarities of this project in order to know what do you think, what the project thinks and plan about mobility, the meeting of the student and which is the general goals of these alliances of university. So Antonella, the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you very much, Elena. Let me share the screen. Hopefully it will work. Okay, it works. Okay, perfect. So, try to go on. Okay, so thanks Elena and thanks to organizer of this webinar. It is a bit of scaring actually to talk about Dorothy Kelly because of her long-standing experience as a Protector for Internationalization and the work with the European Commission and with the Coimbra Group. So I'm pretty new on the field. As Elena told you, I am actually a biochem and I was working on my lab doing my research until last year when I was appointed as a Protector for International Affairs. And within this my first year of appointment, I was actually destroyed by the COVID-19 pandemic. So it has been a challenging year from different point of view. And beside that, the first thing that I was facing when I got appointment was the application for the European Alliance School. And actually I was quite excited because it was a new way to conceive higher education, a new way to conceive mobility within higher education. I was not really interested in that and we submitted the proposal in February 2020. And indeed we got the, we were granted, but of course it was in the middle of the pandemic. And as Dorothy pointed out, we will have our kickoff meeting as a virtual meeting. That's something that is a challenge. It's a challenge for me, it's a challenge for the university, it's a challenge for the Alliance. And we will try to do our best, but we were actually quite lucky in the sense that our Alliance, per se, indeed was facing a new concept of mobility within these European campus. So the Alliance I will talk about in the next 10 minutes or so is the European campus of city universities that we friendly named EC2U. So what is EC2U briefly, very briefly? Well, it is, it will be an European campus. So a new way to conceive a university, not a national university, but an international university. And it will include seven different universities that are spread out from north to south, from east to west of Europe. The coordinator of our Alliance is the University of Poitiers in France, and together with us in Italy, the University of Pavia, this Alliance includes the University of Coimbra and Eliana is with us today, the University of Yash in Romania, the University of Vienna in Germany, the University of Salamanca in Spain, and the University of Turco in Finland. And what this Alliance is peculiar about is that all these seven universities are indeed university embedded in within city campus. So all over the university, EC2U will include 1600,000 students, over 20,000 of staff members and over 1,600,000 citizens. And it will include partners that beside the university are the municipalities, the technological center, the student association and the national accreditation bodies. And also very important is that our Alliance is constituted by Coimbra Group University and Coimbra Group is supporting the Alliance. So what's the story of this seven university? What we share together is over 1,000 paper in peer review journal in the last 10 years. So on some specific field of interest, namely social science and humanities, physics and engineering, health and biology, energy and environmental science. So we start from a common area of interest in order to pursue a new way to share education, research, innovation and to serve the societies. So that was our starting point. And what we aim to obtain with this Alliance? First of all, we really like to have a joint governance with shared resources. So we do believe that if we want to have a real European university, then the governance of this new university needs to join all the academic partner. And I will, as I will point it out later on, all the non-academic partner as well. We want to generate a new campus life with a cultural-inspiring event together with academic activity. And we will foresee the opening of a specific in-person Institute Forum every year. Places where in person we, both academia, cities and socioeconomic stakeholders, could meet together. Now we will foresee this as an in-person event. We now change our view and we know that likely the first city forum will be online in a virtual way. And we actually have the tool and the ability, as I will point it out later on, to do so. So what the Alliance aims to build is the creation of three virtual institutes based on three specific sustainable developmental goals that are the good health and well-being, the quality education and the sustainable city and communities. And these three virtual institutes have the scope to build up a common activity in terms of education among the partners, research, innovation and service to society. And within these three virtual institutes, what we aim to activate as first is the creation of three specific master degree programs, namely lifelong well-being and health-haging in the first SDGs, European languages and culture in contact, the second one, and sustainable cities and communities in the third one. Now in order to accomplish this quite ambitious program, we needed to foresee a new way to imagine, to consider, to implement mobility. We already, before the COVID-19, and I like that Kelly pointed this out, actually a new way to conceive mobility is not only post-COVID-19. Of course, it has been forced to rush up after the COVID-19 pandemic, but it's something that we were actually already planning before the submission last year. So we were planning to implement together with physical, also blended mobility, short mobility, virtual mobility. And we were actually considering not only student mobility, but also we were actually aware of the relevance in order to really implement internationalization in a university campus, the staff mobility. And how to create that, how to make this possible? One of the most difficult things for us was to conceive a way to share data and support mobility within our master degree program and within our three virtual institutes. So what actually we decide to implement in our EC2U Alliance is the creation of a data sharing system, an innovative one, called EC2U Connect Center. Now, when it comes to sharing data and to support education and to support mobility, it's not an easy task. Because one of the traditional way to imagine the sharing data and support mobility is a student center-based. But if it's kind of sharing data and support mobility, then it's something that is a manual. And when you do something manually, and we are the longest-standing experience on that, not myself, but people before me in my university, then all the manual extracting and reinserting student data on case-by-case basis is really an error-prone process. It's a time-consuming process, and it causes misalignment. The other possibility is to move to an automated data exchange on bilateral basis. But in doing that, there are other drawbacks. In particular, we will have an increase in the amount of cost because we needed to set up and perform maintenance of this automated data exchange. And this is actually complicated a lot, the growing up of the alliance or to implement this kind of sharing to other alliances. That can be an interesting point. The other things that it can be done in sharing data and support mobility is to create a centralized database for storing personal data. And this is an option, but if you do that, then you have the problem of privacy. And also you face a political problem and constraints linked to the single university. So none of these three options seem serially appealing for our alliance. And so we decided to move on and to implement a new approach for student and staff data sharing by creating a connect center. So how the connect center will actually allow to perform data sharing and mobility support? First of all, by defining shared data models, interchange formats and interchange protocols, taking advantage of an open data interchange solution, which is standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium. So we don't create really nothing. We apply something that already exists. No personal data storing will actually be allowed outside the master system of each university and processing data through a lot local adapter will make possible the exchange of data between the different partners of the alliance. So what we actually aim with these that we call interchange platform to obtain and to allow the sharing of the data will be to allow for an automatic and efficient data sharing workflow. We will allow a networking scalability because we will be able to set up and maintain linear cost with the increasing of network size. We will facilitate, of course, internationalization because selecting data interchange format format will be used and implemented in within the network. First and second, we also aim to streamline design process. So we will build up on top of something that is standardized in Europe will not create nothing really new, but we will apply innovative tools to our sharing data. And we will protect the we will follow the GDPR compliance. And another important thing so we believe in easy to you as a fundamental for the success of the alliance and support and following up of mobility is the creation or implementation of European student card initiative. We will use and implement this card that not only for student but for staff, we will make sure that the card system already plays in our university partner of the project will be connected to the easy to you card. And we will also make sure that easy to you card will allow implementation and uploading on open badges. I do believe that open badges are crucial element to support career student and staff activity. So what we foresee as the future for the easy to you alliance later on for long term in like where we where we see ourself by 2030. We hope to really create a giant and personalized European diplomas for the three master. We plan to have an extension of the virtual Institute that the tree that I mentioned early on to other sustainable developmental goal and we are actually already actively working on that. We plan to integrate inter university campus life so we won't really academia, cities, stakeholders from industry to work together. And this will happen in a physical easy to you forum every year or if possible and taking advantage of our sharing data platform in a digital way when possible. It's very important for us to have as I mentioned early on and they come back to that common government governance that joined together academia and communities, but also see involved at a different different level all the stakeholder member of these alliance. So, just to close my brief presentation of the alliance and refer reflection on mobility in within the alliance I leave you with our email and website. I feel free to navigate on it feel free on contact us for any further question. What we really believe is that is it to you that has been born. It will be born in next month. Well, no, yesterday was the first day, first of November. I do believe that these alliance will move in a new world post pandemia, but it will actually realize something that has been foreseen even before. So mobility for us is definitely relevant in terms of physical I do believe the physical is essential, but it will embed physical mobility with a new form of mobility, like a short blended summer school will be implemented that I'm sure will implement and help career student and implement the concept of internationalization in a way that as Dorothy just mentioned is not only student going out, but student coming in our campus. So thank you for listening to me and of course I'm hoping to answer questions. Thank you very much, Antonella for this very interesting presentation about one of the ideas that was at the top concept conception to how to create and design and draw a new alliance trees between European campuses. I would particularly appreciate your very smart and intelligent in idea how to collect and use data and make it available sustainable in order to avoid a lot of problem to avoid to create duplicates and go into errors, but to create a way sustainable and in order to use already distant data and to share them. This is just a way to maybe to make a smart way of internationalization between different University as a first point. Just like also your idea to consider from the starting of your project physical blended the short and present virtual mobility for students and stuff. Another very interesting format to conceive internationalization in a large campus, and very interesting idea of a virtual institutes to extend also to research purposes, the idea of European campuses. Maybe there are some questions from. Okay, questions from we can start from the last one question for Professor Antonella for Lino. Do you think putting many procedures will make students face hard work during the COVID 29. Well, thanks for the question. I don't think we really are actually putting many procedure for the student we're actually trying to simplify their life, meaning that what we are facing now is that of course international students have difficulty for several to come in person in our university and when they are coming like they are now in Pavia, they considering the specific situation, they like to come back home because they don't know exactly how long they will be able to be back to their country since likely the border will be shortly close. We hope now that there is a possibility. So, put in place a different kind of mobility will be, and in this case I agree with you may seems a different procedure just different kind of mobility. I have the goal to simplify stuff in terms of allowing a student to take advantage of internationalization by different with different tools, like the virtual or blended mobility and this will actually allow student to get credit for their activity, even if they are not happening in person. So, and also the fact to implement, for example, the EC2U card or EC2U student card anyhow will help them to bring with them their own experience and move with these credit wherever they want to go. So, I actually think that it will simplify student life and university internationalization. Thank you very much Antonella. I would leave the other questions at the end of the webinar in order to have a more articulate response from all the presenter here in the webinar. So, the idea now is to leave the floor to Ignacio Blanco. I would like to have from him another perspective, another idea from another European alliance project, ARCUS, and Ignacio is a senior lecturer in computer science at the department for computer science and artificial intelligence at the University of Granada. He has a PhD in computer science and is the director for international strategy at the Vistorectorate for internationalization of University of Granada. And my pleasure, very, very pleasure fellow in a lot of European groups in a Coimbra group together we were in a learning task force and education innovation working group. And here we are again to discuss about the topic that are in our heart and in our profession that is internationalization and all kinds of tools balancing methodologies and methodologies and ideas that can foster culture in Europe and include the student overall Europe. So, Nacho, the floor is yours. Please introduce us, ARCUS. Thank you very much Elena. Can you hear me? Okay. Perfectly. And you can see the slides. Absolutely. Super. So, let's go with it. So, first of all, we are going to start talking about, okay, I'm going to introduce you. What's the perspective of the ARCUS European University Alliance regarding of the mobility and all the things that supports it. First of all, our main idea is that universities alliances have to enable strategies. There is a whole amount of knowledge around Europe in all regarding research, teaching and learning mobility and everything. And now is the time to gather of the knowledge together. So, this is a very good initiative of the European Commission in order to have all this information together and to help to each other in the creation of something new like a new model for creating new universities for the future. From the perspective of ARCUS, the university, the European University Alliance is people centered. It's centered in all the people involved, not only the students, but also the academic and administrative and technical staff. So, it's for everyone. It's a possibility, a laboratory for institutional learning so we can learn from each other on the ways of doing and create something greater than all of us. Of course, it's mobility and recognition, but not only for the students but for all the staff that is involved with mobility. Join us on participation so it's quite democratic, having the voices of everyone. It's open and, of course, it's sustainable. It's something that is requested from all the alliances. We are creating something for the future or at least a part of the future. Our alliance is integrated by more than 3,800,000 students, more than 24,000 academics and more than 70,000 technical staff. We are seven law-standing comprehensive research universities. So, we have been working together for years in different projects and we share a common profile as international sites. Institutions, we have a very large coalition with our local environments in our medium-sized cities. From our perspective, we decided to divide our work in six different action lines, such as engage European citizens that is coordinated by University of Bergen, one of the members, a student-centered framework for quality learning that is coordinated by Vilnius University, multilingual and multicultural university coordinated by Leipzig, widening access, inclusion and diversity coordinated by University of Padova, entrepreneurial university and regional engagement that is coordinated by IOM, research support and early stage researcher development coordinated by University of Graz and the overall coordination management and dissemination that is taking care from University of Granada. We are organizing different activities within each one of the action lines and all of them are involving mobility, but not only for the students, but also for teachers and administrative staff that can support and help to create this network and the way for moving. We are very used to different kind of mobilities, such as having students going to other universities in order to attend courses in a short period or a long period, only for a course, for a semester, for three months or for the whole degree. We are also used to have teachers moving to other universities for a short period, usually one week, in order to give lessons in courses in other universities. This is the things that we used to do up to the moment. We have also students going to other universities to get courses, but I don't know in your case, I'm also a teacher, it's very difficult to have them integrated in the local groups and so on. So the integration of the people coming or visiting our universities is quite difficult, but it's becoming more and more useful with the times. New modalities for mobility can include groups of teachers and students visiting other universities in order to interact with the students and teachers in other universities in the framework of a course or just an undergraduate course. Okay, what's the future? We have been talking a lot about students, teachers and so on, but there are also researchers and also administrative staff that can perform their research in other institutions or collaborating with people from other institutions, but also the administrative and technical staff and the managers can enrich local universities by learning things from other ones. So the future is a comprehensive way for mobility, including all the people, because even a student visiting other universities and interacting with students and researchers and teachers, they come back to the universities and they integrate the knowledge, even becoming ambassadors of their mobility in their own universities. And now with the technology, we have many more opportunities that can be used. From our perspective, it's quite important to say that all this comprehensive mobility has to be supported. One of the main problems of integrating several universities in the same network is this change of information, as Santonella said before. We are seven big universities with many resources and offering courses and having research facilities and having research groups that can be visited by researchers or PhD students coming from other universities. And this change or the sharing of this information, it's a very big deal that has to be worked on. So the possibility of exchanging information, even knowing that the responsible for each piece of information is each one of the universities, so it's quite important for us. So we have to decide which information has to be shared and how it's going to be shared without having to create anything new that has been worked before. When we go on this issue, I can remember some question that was made before in the chat, like what do you need or which disadvantages can you find in the students when they go online or the use of technology. There are not disadvantages only for the students, but also for the academic and technical staff and also for the managers. So here we have a very good opportunity to enhance the mobility or enhance the exchange. I have to recognize that virtual mobility for me is like a, you know, quite contradictory term right now. So there is a bigger one that is called virtual exchange that includes all the aspects regarding cultural, multilingual aspects that have to be considered in order that the technology can support effectively the physical or classical mobility. From this perspective, we need to train all the people, the students, the teachers, the administrative staff, the managers and policymakers. And in ARCOS, we have a body called ARCOS Academy that is responsible for the certification of all the training and teaching learning activities that are organized by the European Alliance, but also all the activities that can be supported by the by the Alliance, meaning some institutions are already offering some kind of activities that can be reused. So we are open and open to the reuse of any piece of knowledge that is not working. From this perspective, in the different action lines, our Alliance has organized several activities up to the moment, and it's quite, it's something that I'm going to come back by the very end. In the action line for research support and early stage research and development, we have offered now the possibility and it's going to be offered several times during the three years that the European Alliance is going to be running in the piloting phase. We have teams involving PhD students and senior researchers that can join two other teams in the same way. It is like having very big teams integrated by senior researchers, but also by PhD students working on the same issue. And these teams can go from one university to the others. PhD students and academic staff visiting joint research group in ARCOS universities, like these people who can perform their work or be enriched by visiting other research groups, not only teams but individuals. And also the opportunity of having researchers mentoring students in other universities for their PhD studies or their masters. In the action line engage European citizens, we have organized up to the moment the activity rethinking climate change. In this activity that is being developed by the seven universities, 24 students and a number of academic staff have been, well, these students have been selected to participate in order to guarantee a quality environment and a number of academics that are joining locally. These local teams are going to work together in a common proposal and framework in order to have a common experience, so six students will be selected to join a winter school. Six students per each institution and they are going to join the other students and also the academic staff in a winter school that will be organized physically if the pandemic allows it. The student center frameworks for quality learning, it's the action line free, is organizing and supporting all the others because we are talking about mobility and mobility is a part of quality learning. But one of the specific activities that we are organizing is the twinning experience, like having two groups integrated by six students and one academic or research staff that can visit another Arkansas institution from three to five days, one week including trouble. And they are going to join the students and teachers on the other university. So we expect to have the people traveling back, so having cohesion teams working from the teaching perspective, but also enriching the learning perspective for the students. These twinning activities are specifically focused on social sciences and STEM, but not only limited to them. But what else? Okay, I was discussing before with Elena and we have discussed this for years that many projects and initiatives in virtual mobility and you can see these quotes and virtual mobility. And now the term virtual exchange, these projects and initiatives have been happening for years now. What does it mean that those projects and initiatives have created islands of knowledge? This knowledge is spread and separated in the mind of individuals or small groups. And now it's time to gather all them all together and try to create something like where you can go to watch what happened there, what you can reuse or what you can create from that. Because some of them can be combined in order to build something new. So it's time to reuse, to reflect, to build the know-how and to spread the word. And something that we used to say in Aracus is that anything can happen. It means that we are not close to the existing modalities for mobility or just the interaction networking in the universities. Meaning also in the members of the European Alliance, but we are open to anything that can happen. So we need to adapt and to use and of course to report on that in order to be used again without reinventing what it has been used before. And of course, this is all that I wanted to share with you. I can give you this contact on our Alliance. So if you are interested in some extra information, you can contact me or also go to the website or our social networks. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Anaccio. And I really attended to your presentation so incredibly happy to know even if the idea of European campuses, European networks, European alliances, generally speaking are going in the same direction of the inclusivity involving students going on territories of Europe in order to keep together and internationalize using also technologies. There are so different ideas and so different ways to achieve the same goals. This is really fantastic because for example, your project, Aracus project, this kind of idea of action lines is so interesting, which each universities has the role to keep an action lines. The training goal with for example Aracus Academy, very interesting, this one. And from the point of view of sustainability, reuse, use and share in order to circulate ideas, keep the good things and keep them circulating all over the European circuit. Very, very interesting and my congratulations for Aracus project. If you agree, I am inviting participants to write down their questions on question and answer forum. And I would like to go to question and answer time at the end. Now it is my pleasure to give the floor to Liliana with her presentation about a topic maybe that perfectly fits with this discussion that is the mobility at the COVID era and to present how our university can, how can I say, prepare a plan in order to face this great challenge from the pandemic and the methodologies and the tools prepared for students coming at Coimbra University in this time of enlarged mobility, so if we can say in this way. So Liliana, the floor is yours please. Okay, thank you. I have learned a lot with my colleagues from this panel. So thank you for the invitation and thank you for your presentations also. So I'm going to share my presentation right now, I think. Are you seeing this, is everything okay? Yes, we can see your presentation. Yes, let me. Okay. I'm going to talk to you about the University of Coimbra, the challenge of mobility in the pandemic era as we are. Well, we were created in 1219 with more than seven centuries of history. That means we have passed the Black Death period in medieval times. So are we prepared now for this demanding? I think we are in the old universities, we are. We have to look forward and work, but we are. The University of Coimbra, we was the only Portuguese language university in the world until the early 20th century. That means the elite of the Portuguese speaking countries came to our university to study. We have the UNESCO World Heritage since 2013. There are only five universities in the world with this seal and we are one of them. This is the image of the old library that we can see, but it's possible to read books from this library also. We have more than 300 courses divided in the faculty of arts and humanities, law, medicine, science and technology, pharmacy, economics, psychology and educational science, sports science and physical education, the newest one. With 35 undergraduate courses, more than 100 master courses, almost 70 PhD courses. And I can say we have courses to post PhD courses right now. Coimbra is a medium-sized city. The university is spread all over the city with three campus, one university stadium with more than 23 sections voted to sports, different kind of sports. One theater, two museums, 14 student dorms, 18 paintings, 16 libraries and one botanic garden. Regarding scientific research, we have 38 research centers, more than 400 research projects and more than 4,000 publications in Web of Science. And we know that nowadays this is very important to do rankings and so on. More than 100 spin-off enterprises and more than 200 national and international patents in our university. The numbers of our academic community, more than 25,000 students, 1,700 teachers, almost 1,200 researchers and more than 1,300 technicians. A large number for an academic community in a medium-sized city in the middle of Portugal. And what about international members? We have more than 5,000 of foreign students, most of them international students. That means from non-European countries in the undergraduated courses. And the numbers from last academic year, we have 700 of students going abroad and to study in Europe and so on. And we receive more than 1,700 students. So we are an university with multicultural context. And I think we are and we promote the internationalization at home, the comprehensive model of internationalization. And this is very important to our university. All of them, they come from more than 100 nationalities. Everything went well, of course, with all of us till February. And then we have everything changes. We have to create the prevention plan and the actions protocols. In Portuguese and English, always a general guidelines, access and circulation in the University of Coimbra facilities. And we were the first university who decided to lock doors in Portugal and change to a virtual model. To distance learning and home working for all. And then the things that we have done. Improvise, first of course, adapt and overcome. UC provides IT equipment, equipment to students who need it. Emotional now support line for the university community. We created a UC active at home program. It was very interesting to do some exercise from home, from Zoom platform and so on, from to everybody. We created a clinical analysis lab only voted to COVID-19. We produce visors and masks and we donated some visors, more than I think 300 to Mozambique. And we promote online and cultural activities because we were at home and we needed the need and with the help with students association for these kind of things. But it was very, very interesting. But changed to a model or a distance learning model, we changed it, but we have the basis of a very high quality service that I'm going to talk about it. Nowadays, we have several research projects about coronavirus related with quality of the air. Parental burnout because it's difficult to work at home with kids all over the place. New citizenships, heaps and pandemic. An initiative to see thinking about the new normal. What does mean new normal? Prepare the society for a more resilient, sustainable and with a new way of thinking society. And we need to think about all of these. And a technique of project and I only choose one is a they are working about the immune response of our body to coronavirus. One of the things. And changing for the distance learning model. We have this service with a very high quality response, a distance learning service with several courses as you can see. Dedicated also, for instance, exercise in the health for people with special needs or networks and computers. For instance, and also for Portuguese as a foreign language, this is very important of course to us with a different kind of different international students. This is a very important course for them. Research methods courses. Also, this is important for the master students and the PhD students to improve their knowledge and the quality of the courses they have. And what we have done here in the international relations unit, this is the image of our building. We are in the top of the building. What we have done in last month, last March. Monitor incoming and outgoing students via email on a weekly basis. Are you well? Are you not? Are we in Portugal or are you weren't? We created three new skypelines every day from nine to five to answer questions and answer and help students. Incoming outgoing international credit mobility students, teachers, researchers, international students only, refugees, alumni, and general attendance. We contacted embassies and consulates, consulates when the students need help to come and return to Portugal. Also, nowadays this school year is more demanding than ever. But I think we are prepared. We created do see teacher, a new platform to give classes in online and distance learning model. We promote the blending mobility as possible. But for me, I need to say this. Nothing compares with the physical mobility. But we monitor again the students. And we create a lot of online activities, even for Erasmus days. We created the chat rooms, zoom meetings dedicated to Erasmus. And we have done a lot of things and then very interesting ones in this new way of communicate online in online forms that we are also. Here, what we can say about it, new normal in mobility, we have the same problem in all over the world. If we can see this image, there are the same image in all over the world. The access to the buildings, the temperature, the masks, the isolation rooms. A new image that we never can imagine one year ago, tests to the coronavirus. So we have the same image, the same rules in all over the world. So why can't we promote again the mobility? If we can say like this, coronavirus or COVID-19 is all over the world. So we have to be careful with this in our country or in any country we are. We should continue Erasmus in the other mobility programs with new rules, new healthcare. Of course, joining the planning mobility when it's not possible, but not being less efficient in the mobilities and so on. And it is the message that I would like to stress is we need to look forward. We need to improve the mobilities, virtual or not, but not going less efficient. And the students must go abroad when it is possible, the technicians and the teachers also. Because this is very important for multicultural universities. And we live in a global context that we need to share, to improve and create aliens as we have in the Institute and so on. So thank you. This is the message. It's a short one, but I think it's the message from the University of Coimbra. We need to look forward and become forward. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much Liliana for this presentation who shared with us your ability, I have to say, to face with this problem of COVID in your university. I was so incredibly, I look for example at parental burnout. It's fantastic because also from my side I have two sons studying in different universities and it is very, very interesting to think has a universities in relation, not only with students, but also with families. So I think that from your side, not only to provide physical tools like devices, if I remember, but also emotional support. And it's very, very important because sometimes people feel scared with the technologies, feel scared with the new way to. And the idea to stay close to the student also with emotional part is really, really interesting and also offering of course a lot of practical tools, helps solutions and ideas like for example all the health system that you provided for your student. So thank you very much indeed for your presentation and your ideas. I think that we have only four minutes left for this webinar and okay there are two very, very challenging questions. The first one maybe Dorothy just two words about too much languages in Europe and this is a disadvantage from my side. On my side I think that behind a language there is a culture and when there is a culture I am happy to share the culture with other people but maybe Dorothy the floor is yours. And the second longer question from leave Van de Vrande and I think that each of you can feel free to answer. Thank you. Okay, shall I just very briefly. I don't think there are ever too many languages I think that linguistic diversity is a huge, huge richness a huge wealth. It is one of the greatest wealth of the European continent. And as Elena said also of course linked to the cultural diversity which accompanies language diversity and as a linguist, I would never ever say there are too many languages. No, never, never. Thank you. A huge, a huge richness for us all. Thank you very much. For the last question maybe from leave there was leave Van de Vrande. Maybe Nacho wrote an answers to leave. I share your concern leave it anyway you can. The question is this the pedagogical models of emergency distance learning during the COVID-19 different significantly from those applied in ideal online learning and teaching and this is true. Will users professors and learners not be disappointed that go back to a traditional face to face teaching after COVID. Will COVID not have a negative impact on online learning your options please feel free to to to come with your contribution. Maybe yes absolutely. I was that I think that there is a very big confusion. Even with when we are talking about virtual mobility, virtual exchange and everything. There are many terms that we are not used to use. And it's the same with online teaching and learning with distance learning and so on. This is a discussion that we have when we when I arrived Coimbra group of universities in 2010 at the learning task force. There was some kind of discussion on what we are talking about because in learning is only a part of distance learning. There are many different modalities. Most of the universities know when because of the rush, you know, we have to adapt in a very short time. And we move from the physical learning to the distance learning, not to the learning because there are two different approaches with different methodologies, different tools. And of course many of us we need the training for facing this about going back to the to the when we have to go back to the face to face lessons. I think I'm not going to abandon what I have learned because I can extend the experience of my students, interacting them abroad, the classroom. I mean, I'm going to keep in touch. Somebody else is Anila was asking what about the problem of making the assessment for online and distance education, even involving virtual exchange or virtual mobility. So it's a real problem. I have decided I'm not going to use exams in the online environments because it's very easy. You cannot have a very clear information of what the people have learned there. So it's a lot of work for me as a teacher, but I have to work interactively with them. And I can apply some kind of evaluation by observation, like interacting, interviewing, making them to make presentations to the other people, be reviewing and all the things that can be also be done with the technology. So I think nobody is going back to the old modes. I agree with you, Nacho, there will be maybe a rethink and unbundle and rebundle a way to produce education, to produce learning. But we will go straight away just to build something new with new tools, new methodologies and new ideas. I think that now unfortunately is the time to stop if Linda and the organizer confirm me, maybe there are some other questions, but I want to stay in my slot because other people are coming after us. So what can I say? Really, thank you to all participants. Thank you to our panelists for this very, very insightful presentation. It was really great to spend this afternoon with you and for my side, I learned a lot. Thank you very much. Bye-bye and to the next opportunity. Hello. Hello. Thank you. Thank you Elena. Thank you very much indeed. Bye-bye colleagues. Bye-bye.