Virtual campus tests EU vision for borderless university system

Nearly six years after its launch, EuroTeQ Engineering University is testing whether Europe’s vision of cross-border higher education can work in practice.

It brings together nine science and technology universities as well as business schools across the continent under a shared virtual campus. Students at any member institution can browse a joint course catalogue and enrol at a partner university using their existing university credentials. No separate application is needed. 

“We’re trying to standardise and harmonise the parts that we can,” said Patrick Crowley, a project lead at EuroTeQ. 

The goal is to make it easier for students to study across borders by allowing universities to share courses more directly than traditional exchange programmes.

“In some cases, the idea of taking a whole semester abroad is kind of a remote fantasy,” Crowley explained, adding that this is often the case for students who are working alongside their studies or have family responsibilities. “This way we can offer courses they might be able to take while they study where they are.”

But, as with many pan-European initiatives, coordinating different ways of doing things remains a hurdle. With dozens of different higher education systems, languages, policies, traditions, Europe’s higher education system is highly fragmented across national borders. The European Union (EU) is hoping to coax universities towards something resembling a coherent European system where collaboration is easier. 

EuroTeQ is funded by the European Universities Initiative, a flagship European Commission programme aimed at improving cooperation and making institutions across the continent more competitive on a global stage where American and Asian universities increasingly set the pace. Each alliance gets up to around €14.4 million (£12.4 million) in EU funding over a four-year period under the 2021-27 Erasmus+ programme.  

Universities often operate on different academic calendars, face different budget constraints and have deeply established ways of working. EuroTeQ’s partners range from public institutions like the Technical University of Munich to grandes écoles like HEC Paris. “All our universities have extremely different academic year structures,” Crowley explained, “including when the semester starts, when it ends, when exam periods are”.

Persuading professors to take part has also proven a challenge. Academics are under mounting pressure to prioritise research output, a structural issue that Crowley said cut across higher education more broadly. “Research is so incentivised these days, but teaching also needs to be linked in there somehow, so that you also have resources as a professor to [adapt a course for EuroTeQ].”

There is also the more basic challenge of getting students to notice EuroTeQ exists at all. “It is a noisy space on campuses; students have a lot of different things to consider.”

But Crowley said EuroTeQ has been tackling the bureaucracy piece by piece. It has built a shared enrolment system that lets students sign up to partner courses using their existing university credentials, removing the need for a separate application. He added that the differences among universities are not necessarily a barrier, but part of what makes collaboration valuable. 

It is also now working on automatic grade transfer, so that when a student completes a course at a partner university, the result flows back to their home institution without anyone manually verifying a document. The plan is also to create a digital student card that works across every campus in the network.

Crowley also pointed to a recent joint course run across Tallinn University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology and Czech Technical University in Prague that drew 37 students who spent eight weeks collaborating online before meeting in person for a final week. By the time the students met in person, there was already a sense of camaraderie, he said.

For the lecturers, the model offered a practical incentive too. Since the curriculum is shared across three institutions, each professor had to commit to teaching just twice over the eight weeks. “While they had to frontload a lot of the work getting the curriculum together, when it came to actual lecturing it was shared,” Crowley said. “That frees them up to do more of such initiatives and also focus on research, while also keeping the quality of the education high.”

Crowley also stressed that while Erasmus+ works for a specific kind of student, EuroTeQ is designed for those it leaves behind. 

“When you see students still taking online courses even as Erasmus mobility returns to pre-pandemic levels, that suggests to me there are other students here who are also keen on the experience that EuroTeQ offers,” he said.

 seher.asaf@timeshighereducation.com