EPIC will contribute to the Modernisation of European Higher Education by developing a flexible framework for international student projects, carried out across universities and in collaboration with industrial partners and research environments. By the end of the project, the aim is that the framework and supporting materials are sustainable and will be taken up by more universities and companies all over Europe. The approach is scalable, and provides clear benefits for the participating students, supervisors, institutions and companies, while at the same time being cost-effective due to the use of virtual collaboration and blended learning. The partnership intends to increase the quality and relevance of higher engineering education within and beyond the participating institutions particularly by focusing on increased employability, closer collaboration between students and industry, internationalisation, increased labour market relevance of education, increased learning outcome by promoting active learning methods based on real-world problem solving, promotion of the take-up of ICT tools and Open Education Resources, and giving the students transversal competences. The partnership will involve participants and other stakeholders in order to develop models for international student projects, based on real problems from companies, which are useful in reality. During the EPIC project these will be tested,evaluated and adjusted continuously through three yearly cycles. The student projects can take different forms, for example joint projects, or projects where several groups work on different aspects of the same problem with clear interfaces between them. The most important is that the students get to work together across disciplines, in an international setting, and on real-world problems. This approach makes it possible to integrate and recognize the work within existing study programmes, which is important for a more widespread take-up and thus for the impact and sustainability of the project. The project work is facilitated by an array of ICT-based educational resources that are made available for the students, focusing on e.g. project planning and management, team work, entrepreneurship and innovation, ICT-based training materials for supervisors, and other documents that motivates and supports the take-up of the approach for companies and universities. All the material developed will be made publicly available for use and exploitation, and the partnership has a strong focus on spreading both the knowledge about and take-up of the methods and materials developed throughout the partnership. By the end of the project the aim is to have presented the work to at least 2.000 teachers face-to-face, and involve at least 25 companies beyond the existing partnership. Two years after the partnership has ended we aim at having involved 70 organisations in such collaborative student projects. While the project has a clear international scope, and focus on students working on project proposals together across nationalities and disciplines, we expect that the results are also useful on a local/regional/national scale, and will support more such projects to be done in local settings. The project partners include eight universities from different countries, as well as two companies. On average each yearly cycle will involve around 32 students and 16 supervisors from across the eight universities.
EPIC has contributed to the modernisation of European Higher Education by developing a flexible framework for international student projects, carried out across universities and in collaboration with industrial partners and research environments. It has been developed, tested and refined based on the experiences of three years, and it has been made available along with supporting materials published as Open Educational Resources. The materials also document our experiences through qualitative and quantitative evaluations, examples and success stories. The framework provides different models of setting up international and interdisciplinary student projects, reflecting different needs and regulations - making the framework useful for most institutions who want to work with international, interdisciplinary and/or problem based projects. The approach developed is scalable and cost-efficient due to the use of virtual collaboration and blended learning. The framework has also demonstrated its value through good evaluations, and by being used by partner institutions and beyond. For example, many ideas of EPIC are continued in a new initiative on collaborative student projects, bringing students from different disciplines and countries together to work on problems related to the sustainable development goals, and including universities from Europe, South America and Africa. Each year was conducted as a cycle, consisting of: -Planning of projects and collaborations -Preparation of training materials, guidelines and seminar -5-day project planning seminar for students and supervisors -Project work, virtually but with the option for one additional blended mobility -Evaluation and reflection -Dissemination activities Students, teachers and companies were involved throughout each cycle. Due to Covid-19, the additional mobility in the last year was cancelled, and part of the dissemination went virtual. Yet, the project prepared us to work within all the restrictions also in our other teaching tasks. After the evaluation of each yearly cycle, the framework and materials were revised. Year 2 focused especially on improving the support for students by streamlining the whole process of carrying out the projects (e.g. by integrating the preparation phase better with the project planning seminar, by facilitating a more structured workflow during the project seminar, and by linking the outcome of the seminar better to the virtual collaboration). Year 3 focused especially on creating a joint scope for the various projects to enhance collaboration and understanding between the projects - using the Sustainable Development Goals for this turned out to be a very good approach. The framework developed is flexible, and allows students from different backgrounds and countries to work together - even if learning objectives and workloads are different - and allows for both tight and loosely coupled collaborations. It has been tested with teams of 2-10 students, and it was demonstrated that the approach makes it possible to integrate and recognise the work within existing programmes, which is important for a more widespread take-up. The project work is supported by ICT-based educational resources that are made available for the students and supervisors, focusing on e.g. project planning/management, team work, entrepreneurship and innovation, supervision, and other documents that supports the take-up of the approach for companies and universities. Also, an open source IT tool was customised to support the collaboration process. All the materials developed are publicly available for use and exploitation, and are presented in a user friendly online course format. The partnership has contributed to increase the quality and relevance of higher education within and beyond the participating institutions particularly by focusing on increased employability, closer collaboration between students and industry, internationalisation, increased labour market relevance of education, increased learning outcome by promoting active learning methods based on real-world problem solving, promotion of the take-up of ICT tools and Open Education Resources, and by giving the students transversal competences. The evaluations show that the project had a significant impact on the participants, and we also see a systemic impact on the participating organisations. As planned, more than 2.000 teachers were reached face2face, and 6 conference papers were published targeting practitioners and the didactical society (including a student paper that won the "Best Student Paper Award"). 25 companies (including three Centres of Applied Research) were involved in student projects, along with 102 students and 50 supervisors (incl. repetitions). In summary, EPIC has developed and tested a paradigmatic formula for carrying out industry/academia collaboration, and for implementing the project based learning with groups of students of blended expertise and background.