Despite the the Bologna process and the ambitious proposal of the creation of a European Education Area with the aim of strengthening teaching and mobility efforts, approaches to training and reward schemes of professors, higher education teachers and doctoral supervisors are still mostly confined to single institutions or national policies and lack international transparency and comparability. Whilst national approaches have made significant progress, higher education training remains fragmented and the recognition of higher education teaching qualifications schemes for universities lack consistency at the European level. What is needed in the long-term is a truly European approach to promoting and rewarding minimum standards of teaching excellence. Therefore, the overarching objective of the European Network on Teaching Excellence (E-note) is to contribute to more transparency, coherence and convergence in the field of the training, promotion and reward of higher education teaching skills by developing a blueprint for a common higher education teaching qualification scheme, including a comprehensive mapping exercise, best practice guide, elements of a common training curriculum and a self-assessment tool as well as evaluation guidelines. Such a common teaching qualification scheme blueprint will contribute to the possibility of setting up a shared broad curriculum of training high education teachers in the field of BA and MA teaching excellence and of best practices in the field of doctoral supervision. As such, the blueprint can on the one hand help institutions without formal teaching qualification and training schemes to create them according to the best practice handbook and blueprint developed by E-note, and on the other hand, it can contribute in the medium-term to the mutual recognition of training and qualification schemes. Overall, such a blueprint will also contribute to the internationalisation of higher education staff skills and career development in a European context. The project - carried out by a consortium of 4 universities in 4 countries (Leiden, Copenhagen, Coimbra and Charles University) a European think tank and the Coimbra Group (a network of 40 universities across Europe) is in itself a transnational endeavour since it requires the facilitation of a common ground between national approaches and to facilitate an innovative transnational European approach. Participants will be recruited from the partner institutions for the training activities and external stakeholders will be invited for the multiplier events. Participants will be early career academics as well as senior professors as well as academic senior managers dealing with teaching excellence, administrative staff dealing with teacher training and recognition of teaching qualifications as well as policy officials in the national ministries and relevant EU institutions and international organisations. The project is based on a methodology that combines collaborative approaches and is suited to the different objectives, outputs and activities, including desk research and stakeholder interviews for mapping and best practice identification, surveys for the evaluation of training and common curriculum design and qualitative research methods for the compiling of best practice handbooks and the blueprint. The envisaged results are a combination of 7 Intellectual Outputs: a comprehensive mapping exercise, the development of a common curriculum, the development of best practice guidelines on the evaluation, reward and promotion of teaching excellence and the implementation and evaluation of a pilot common teaching qualification scheme and training course for higher education teaching and measures for rewarding and promoting teaching excellence in the four participating universities (implemented via four teaching and learning activities). In addition, two outputs tie together the joined lessons learned from the previous four outputs in the form of a blueprint for a common European framework of higher education teaching excellence, including the development of an online self-assessment tool for universities and a best practice and lessons learned handbook tying together all results of the project outputs and results. This best practice handbook will be made freely available on an online platform and -together with the blueprint- will be disseminated widely by the universities, think tank and Coimbra Group members to core target group member. The aim is to stimulate with this and the project results a reflection and action towards a truly European teaching qualification and reward scheme. The long-term benefits could be follow-up activities by the consortium team and their partners towards a common European Curriculum and even Certificate on European Teaching Excellence.
The overarching objective of the European Network on Teaching Excellence (E-NOTE) was to contribute to increased collective knowledge, transparency and tools for advancing a European approach to Higher Education Teaching Excellence. The aim of this ambitious project -implemented by four major European Universities, a Brussels-based think tank and the Coimbra Group association of 41 European universities- was to develop core tools, trainings, events and outputs that could contribute to wider discussions towards a blueprint and common European Teaching Excellence scheme. E-NOTE sought to generate an extensive in-depth dialogue amongst the partners and external participants of the project’s trainings, workshops and multiplier events on how core elements of such a common approach to training and promoting European teaching excellence could look like. The aim was to develop together through a strategic partnership a variety of intellectual outputs and test trainings that would provide evidence-based insights for building some elements of a European approach to teaching excellence. This also included reflections on the impact of COVID19 and teaching excellence at BA, MA and PhD level.
Despite the European ambitions of advancing a European Education Area (EEA), the European Higher Education Sector remains fragmented and highly diverse with national, regional and often differing institutional approaches to understanding, defining, training, rewarding and promoting excellence in higher education. There is a need for facilitating stronger convergence between different national approaches in order to truly achieve a EEA worth its name. With its core aim of “removing barriers from learning and improving access to quality education for all”, the EEA has already made good progress at the level of students (such as, e.g., the introduction of the European Credit Transfer System). Yet, a comparable move towards harmonisation of higher education at the level of the teacher and teaching standards has lagged behind. The lack of a European approach to defining, let alone training and rewarding teaching excellence can also be seen as a barrier in the long-run to the realisation of the EEA. The proposed E-NOTE project seeks to address this issue head-on by offering evidence-based research, tools, trainings and collective exchanges of best practices towards a European approach to HE teaching excellence.