Double Degrees were developed at the beginning of the 90s by pioneering academics and have constantly evolved over years until they became a crucial component of the internationalization policies of most Higher Education Institutions in Europe and beyond. This project has the ambition of covering the gaps identified in all the known previous initiatives focusing on an analysis of the current state of the art for what concerns joint programmes and make use of past experiences and specific competence at the partner universities to develop the next generation of European Joint Programmes (JPs) with a strong focus on employability. The participation of companies in JPs is in fact still very limited and the developers still pay little, if any attention, to the needs of the employers when designing the curricula and related learning outcomes. The activities will be carried out by a subset of 7 members of the CLUSTER network, one partner university from Estonia and one from the Czech Republic. This consortium represents a very comprehensive geographical basis and all the partners are top technical universities in their country with an extensive experience in developing and managing JPs. The main target groups for the carried out activities will be alumni who recently graduated from JPs at the partner universities, academics who have previously developed and managed JPs, employers with a string cooperation with academia, academics willing to establish new JPs with a strong industrial component, university administrators, and students who will be recruited to the pilot JPs that the consortium will create. A comprehensive picture of past and present experiences in the field of joint educational initiatives involving industry and academia is currently missing and will be here extensively covered. The project has also a broad geographical scope since the consortium has the ambition of covering all the European countries (including the ones not directly represented in the consortium) and the planned surveys should go deeper than the one carried out previously as to provide more comparable data and identify the different level of performance of the different types of programmes, different level of satisfaction and different expectations in different countries, and differences in performance level in different scientific areas. The survey will be followed by interviews to the target groups to clarify the key issues that will have emerged. In parallel, desk research on successful Joint Programmes involving industry worldwide will be performed and concluded by a report with recommendations on the lessons learned. Based on these findings, the consortium will develop a number of pilot Joint Programmes with full involvement of companies in all the phases making use of the guidelines, recommendations from the desk research and results of the survey and interviews. The scope is to create initially a small set of innovative Joint Programmes based on excellence as to test the framework with the long term perspective of enlarging this network. Each partner will focus on the involvement of those companies that better represent the industrial context of the country/region/city, the field in which the university feels stronger or in which the cooperation with industry is more intensive and fruitful. The programmes are launched and tested and the first cohort of students enrolled in the newly created JPs will be surveyed again at the end of the project lifetime to evaluate the actual value of the new programmes compared with the old ones. Interviews with programme directors and employers will also be carried out to collect feedback on this impact. The main impact of the project will be to increase the internationalization of the European HEIs, better combine the academic offer with the needs and expectations of the employers, provide the graduates with relevant and innovative learning outcomes and provide policy actors at all levels with evidence on the real value of JPs. Through the project activities, the consortium aims at strengthening the attractiveness of Joint Programmes in Europe and enhance the attractiveness of the European Higher Education Area as a long-term effect. The framework that the consortium will develop will be institutionalized through the network of industry-academic JPs that the project will create and this will hopefully develop into a standard that will influence the future of JPs in general. This might influence the structure of the next generation of European programmes supporting the creation of Joint Programmes and in particular the upcoming European Universities initiative that the consortium sees as one of the main arena where the project results will be transferred, sustained and further exploited.
Double Degrees were developed at the beginning of the 90s by pioneering academics and have constantly evolved over years until they became a crucial component of the internationalization policies of most Higher Education Institutions in Europe and beyond. The present project had the ambition of covering the gaps identified in all the known previous initiatives focusing on an analysis of the current state of the art for what concerns joint programmes and making use of past experiences and specific competence at the partner universities to develop the next generation of European Joint Programmes (JPs) with a strong focus on employability. The participation of companies in JPs was and still is in fact very limited and the developers still pay little, if any attention, to the needs of the employers when designing the curricula and related learning outcomes. The activities have been carried out by a subset of 6 members of the CLUSTER network (which are now also members of the European University Initiative alliance Unite!), one partner university from Estonia and one from the Czech Republic. This consortium represents a very comprehensive geographical basis and all the partners are top technical universities in their country with extensive experience in developing and managing JPs. The main target groups for the carried out activities have been alumni who recently graduated from JPs at the partner universities, academics who have previously developed and managed JPs, academics new to JPs, employers with strong cooperation with academia, academics willing to establish new JPs with a strong industrial component, university administrators, current JP students, and students who will be recruited to the pilot JPs that the consortium will create. A comprehensive picture of past and present experiences in the field of joint educational initiatives involving industry and academia was missing and has been therefore extensively covered by the project. The project had also a broader geographical scope since the consortium covered all the European countries (including the ones not directly represented in the consortium) and the surveys went deeper than the one carried out previously so as to provide more comparable data and identify the different level of performance of the different types of programmes, different level of satisfaction and different expectations in different countries, and differences in performance level in different scientific areas. The surveys have been followed by interviews with the target groups to clarify the key issues that will have emerged. In parallel, desk research on successful Joint Programmes involving industry worldwide has been performed and concluded by a report with recommendations on the lessons learned. Based on these findings, the consortium has started to facilitate the creation of a number of pilot Joint Programmes that respond to the identified needs and solutions by making use of the created guidelines, recommendations from the desk research and results of the survey and interviews. The scope is to create in the coming years a pool of innovative Joint Programmes based on excellence so as to test the framework with the long term perspective of enlarging this network. Each partner will focus on the involvement of those companies that better represent the industrial context of the country/region/city, the field in which the university feels stronger or in which the cooperation with industry is more intensive and fruitful. The initial plan to launch and test the newly created JPs already during the project lifetime turned out to be too ambitious and was removed by the evaluator already in the selection phase. It is nevertheless still in the plan of the consortium that is currently considering to apply for a follow-up project in this sense which will also include a number of new elements that will characterize the JPs in the future in the light of the post-pandemic scenario and the new overarching priorities set by the European Commission for the next generation of programmes. The main impact of the project has been to increase the internationalization of the European HEIs, better combine the academic offer with the needs and expectations of the employers, provide the graduates with relevant and innovative learning outcomes and provide policy actors at all levels with evidence on the real value of JPs. Through the project activities, the consortium has objectively strengthened the attractiveness of Joint Programmes in Europe and enhanced the attractiveness of the European Higher Education Area as a long-term effect. All the performed actions led to the creation of an informal network/umbrella of HEIs and companies committed to constantly improve and update JPs in this sense. All these actions are already having an impact on the creation of the European degree and on the operations of the European University Initiative.