The university community can participate in the gastronomic week in the bars of Catalunya campus and Sescelades campus during the "Aurora Staff Week”

The URV has prepared and is now hosting the first Blended Intensive Programme for Aurora Alliance staff, “Aurora Staff Week”, a week of intensive training for academics, coordinators, and managers of international relations from most of the universities that are part of the Alliance of European Aurora Universities. From Monday to Friday, around 25 people from eleven universities will be working together on Catalunya campus on internationalisation at home and internationalisation of the curriculum.

Towards the interuniversity campus with innovative methods

The training sessions aim to design and put into practice specific proposals so that the Aurora network partners can work together to implement policies and actions in higher education institutions that go beyond mobility.

This reinforces the links between the universities belonging to the Aurora Alliance so that they can become an inter-university campus, as part of the initiative of European Universities.

One of the pillars of the training is the new Erasmus+ program “BIP” or Blended Intensive Programmes (BIP). These are short-term intensive programmes that use innovative learning and teaching methods, one of which is that part of the training is done through online cooperation. Programmes may include challenge-based learning, in which transnational and transdisciplinary teams work together to solve challenges, which may be connected to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals or other societal challenges pointed out by regions, cities, or businesses. By enabling new and more flexible mobility formats that combine physical mobility with a virtual component, the blended intensive programmes are designed for all types of students, from all backgrounds, fields of study, and cycles.

In fact, the “Aurora Staff Week” itself has been conceived precisely as a blended intensive programme, in which both the teaching staff and the participating technical and administrative staff receive face-to-face training in Tarragona

combined with some online training sessions before and after this international week.

Being a Staff Week (a training and mobility activity for university staff) designed for results and collaborative work within the Aurora Alliance, some of the facilitators are members of the URV staff, such as Marina Casals, head of the International Center, or Marina Vives, responsible for internationalisation at home and coordinator of the Staff Week (International Center), while others are from the Copenhagen Business School, the University of Iceland, the University of Duisburg-Essen, the University of Innsbruck, the Federal University Secondo and the University of Palacky, all members of the Aurora Alliance.

Aurora Gastronomic Week

Coinciding with this international week, all members of the URV community can participate in the Aurora Gastronomic Week. The bar on Catalunya Campus and Sescelades Campus will have a typical dish from five of the countries of the Aurora Alliance on the menu every day of the week: stamppot, from the Netherlands; hovězí guláš, from the Czech Republic; fish & chips, from Great Britain; schnitzel, kartoffelsalat & sauerkraut, from Germany; and gnocchi allasorrentoina, from Italy.