East African-European Virtual Exchange for Environmental Conservation and Climate Action (ECO-ACT)

Programme(s): Erasmus+ (ERASMUS+)
Topic(s): ERASMUS-EDU-2024-VIRT-EXCH
Type of action: ERASMUS Lump Sum Grants
Project ID: 101193492

Objective: The ECO-ACT project is implemented by a consortium of 6 partner organizations, including 4 universities from East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and South Sudan) and 2 universities from Europe (Poland and Bulgaria). The overall objective of our project is to improve management, administrative and instructional capacity of partner HEIs to provide equitable, future oriented, digital and high-quality education on environmental conservation and climate change that promotes inclusiveness, diversity and sustainable growth opportunities. We intend to produce a transversal modular Virtual Exchange (VE) programme on environmental conservation and climate change including video lectures, webinars and collaborative student projects implemented in transnational teams in a virtual learning environment, under the guidance of trained facilitators (VE mentors). The VE programme is planned to include: (a) an open online course, consisting of 10 modules, which will present learning content in the form of short, 10-15 min. video lectures; (b) one webinar per module followed by an open semi-structured discussion; and (c) collaborative online international projects implemented by groups of students from different partner HEIs. The VE programme will be approved by the partner HEIs’ curriculum committees and fully integrated into at least 2 curricula in each partner university. The project foresees training of VE mentors who will facilitate the VE programme implementation. Within the programme piloting, we will implement 10 virtual exchanges involving a total of 1500 students and 78 mentors. The VE results will be presented at large-scale Virtual Knowledge Sharing Workshop to min. 300 stakeholders, and disseminated to the higher education authorities in East African partner countries in the form of policy briefs. Partner universities will sign a consortium agreement with the ambition to continue implementing the ECO-ACT VE programme on annual basis after the end of the project.