The European Commission announced results the call for the piloting of two new instruments in the field of higher education at the European level: Common European Diploma (European Degree Label) and Institutionalized EU cooperation instruments – the European legal status for alliances of higher education institutions. As part of the UNITA alliance of European universities, the Western University of Timisoara will take part in the implementation of both instruments, which puts UVT in a position to contribute directly to the future of European higher education.
UVT Rector, Marilen Pirtea: "From the very beginning, the UNITA alliance of European universities had as its objective the constant development of common actions in order to innovate in education and research, for students and for society, and the Western University of Timisoara assumed an active role in all these actions. The basis of tomorrow's higher education at the European level will be university networks and their joint initiatives. Only in this way will Europe be able to be globally competitive in the fields of Education and Research. Through the two projects for which UVT was selected by the European Commission, we will continue to contribute to what tomorrow's students will experience, offering them opportunities that will become common practices, even if today they seem like only ambitious ideas. Also, UVT has always supported the transfer of good practices between higher education institutions that are members of European university alliances, but also from them to the entire system, especially at the national level, by initiating the RO European Universities network."
About European legal status for alliances of higher education institutions, the European Commission selected only three alliances to pilot the initiative, including UNITA, within which UVT is a founding university, along with five other universities from Italy, France, Spain and Portugal. Only two universities in Romania will be directly involved in these projects, the West University of Timisoara and the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. In this case, UVT will implement the project EGAI- UNITA as a model for institutionalized university cooperation from the European Grouping of Economic Interest to the European Grouping of Academic Interest. It will explore a unique, novel and innovative model of cooperation in the university field that can be developed and improved, and then transferred as a model of good practice to other consortia of higher education institutions in Europe.
Regarding Common European Diploma, UNITA and implicitly UVT, represents one of the associated partners of the CIVIS alliance of European universities (represented in Romania by the partner University of Bucharest) within the project SMARTT- Screening, mapping, analyzing, recommending, transferring and transforming HE international programss, one of the six financed by the European Commission in this regard. This project brings together several alliances of European universities, its impact being estimated as very extensive. Moreover, at the European level, inter-university collaborations represent a step forward towards the pooling of resources, in order to develop useful tools for the entire higher education system at the European level. The main objectives of this project are the development of a model for the common European diploma, as well as a guide with recommendations regarding its implementation.
