This article reports on the first results of the educational model piloted in EUTOPIA, a transnational university alliance established under the European University initiative. We discuss the theoretical underpinnings and core principles of our model which seeks to enable students, academics and societal partners to form Connected Learning…

Social media has become an important tool for universities to implement strategies to promote, position and differentiate their brand identity, to establish and foster the communicative relationship with their stakeholders. This study explores the interactivity strategy developed in digital communication by 70 leading universities from Europe, the…

This paper reports on a model for participatory curriculum development that builds on a 'connected learning communities' (CLC) approach. We describe and analyse the trajectory of six CLC-cases using a framework informed by Social Practice Theory (SPT). The activities we report on took place during the first pilot year (2020-2021) of a…

This study explores the establishment of communities of practice within teaching and learning centres (TLC) as strategies for advancing faculty development in higher education, examining their implementation in the US and Europe, with a specific focus on Italy. Utilising organisational benchmarking, we employed an explanatory, comparative, and…

Purpose: Higher education institutions (HEIs) have a pivotal role in global sustainable development. The purpose of this study is to assess the QualEnv Consortium's contributions (QualEnv, a cooperative network of 16 universities across several countries, aimed to promote sustainability within HEIs). This paper focuses on three key objectives:…

In addition to demographic characteristics, it is important to understand how the location of prior educational experiences may impact adjustment for international students. Indeed, international students who graduate from high school outside their home countries are assumed to have easier college adjustments than others due to their previous…

Children from Roma communities are consistently among the lowest academic achievers in many European countries and this holds true in Greece. In Greek schools, Roma students experience high dropout rates and low performance compared to their non-Roma peers. Moreover, in Greece, as elsewhere, Roma experience wide-spread discrimination. Drawing on a…

This study explored how a group of academics in China and Europe used WeChat to build a Community of Practice online, which supported their interdisciplinary collaboration and professional development. We primary used a qualitative research design, combining with a data mining technique, and the qualitative data were mainly from multiple sources…

In "Belonging and Identity in STEM Higher Education," leading scholars, teachers, practitioners and students explore belonging and identity in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields, and how this is impacted by disciplinary changes and the post-pandemic higher education context. In STEM fields, positivist…

Studies about curriculum internationalisation in higher education frequently report poor academic staff engagement hindering implementation in practice. However, such research does not consider the organisational context in which academics operate. This research applies an organisational change perspective to explore how the "context"…

This article demonstrates and explains the benefits accruing to communities that involve universities in their local community-based projects from the context of community-based work taking place in Europe. We include concrete arguments intended to stimulate the transfer of the universities' accumulated knowledge to local (urban) community…

During the last decades, there has been increasing interest in the role of the university as a key stakeholder and agent in innovation and regional development. In the face of new technologies, especially growing digitalisation and new societal and economic challenges, this paper proposes to reconsider the role of the university in the innovation…

This qualitative case study examines, through an educational equity lens, the motivation, challenges, and assessment associated with international program development as appraised by the faculty and administrators in a district of multiple community colleges. To this end, semi-structured interviews were conducted with four faculty members and…

In this article, the motives for voluntary work and work values in higher education contexts are examined in a cross-border region in Central Eastern Europe. Our goal is to find out what kind of relationship exists between different types of volunteering and work values among young people. In the theoretical section, we deal with the definition of…

The purpose of this study is to identify and characterize the state of social construction of learning in virtual communities within online learning environments and to identify the advances and research challenges of social learning. The method was a systematic mapping to analyze the evidence published on the topic in 2015-2020. We automatically…