At this year’s Eurodoc conference from 26-29 April 2017 in Oslo, Norway, Burim Ramaj and Cécile Blaser, both University of Fribourg, represented actionuni. Eurodoc is the European Association of doctoral candidates and young researchers. actionuni (Switzerland) is member in Eurodoc since 2006. In total, 32 organisations are member of Eurodoc, representing their respective European countries and the Council of Europe.

This year’s topic was of the Annual Conference of Eurodoc was “Open Science”, a heavily discussed topic also in Switzerland.

Continue reading Eurodoc Conference 2017 “Open Science” and Annual General Meeting →

On 15 February 2017, actionuni met for the first time with representatives of the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation, SERI. actionuni’s new structures were presented and it was agreed to establish a regular contact with the SERI. The main topic was how actionuni can be involved in the definition of the next federal message on education, research and innovation policy 2021-2024.

Co-presidents Florian Lippke and Andrea Tamas attended the 1^st AAQ Institutional Accreditation Day on 25 November 2016 on the topic “Communicating quality assurance“. The program consisted of three presentations by international speakers about “The dos and don’ts of organizational communication: A theoretic approach”, “Qualitätskultur als Kommunikationskultur – Interne Qualitätssicherung über Dialog” and “Reaching out: How to improve better communication and committment of your institution’s quality assurance” as well as a round-table discussion on “Effiziente Kommunikationsstrukturen: Wie erreicht man Studierende?”. Conclusions can be found in an inspiring visual recording of the day and the workshop outcomes on the AAQ-webpage.

The next AAQ Institutional Accreditation Day will take place on 29 November 2018.

On 3-4 November 2016, a conference on “A Swiss Way to Research Quality” took place in Berne, which was the final event of the swissuniversities program “Performances de la recherche en sciences humaines et sociales“. Co-president Florian Lippke was invited to a panel discussion on 4 November. Together with Geneviève Le Fort, Michael Hengartner, Catherine Paradeise and Alexander Hasgall under the moderation of Jacques Lanarès he discussed a position paper on the diversity of evaluation in research.

A video is available here.

The second meeting of actionuni with swissuniversities, VSS and swissfaculty took place last week. The most pressing topic we discussed was the upcoming political debate about how Switzerland can be fully associated to Horizon2020 and Erasmus+ again.

An important communication tool is the Blog AdValue by swissuniversities:

advalue-switzerland.ch

Have you been negatively impacted by the discontinuation with Horizon2020 and Erasmus+ after February 2014? Contribute with your story to the blog “AdValue”. Contact us or the blog-responsible Maria Christoffel directly at christoffel@swissuniversities.ch if you want to contribute to the blog.

It is needed to make the benefits of Horizon2020 and Erasmus+ clear to a wide audience and keep a constant buzz regarding the importance of re-integrating Switzerland into the European research area.

Further topics we discussed were:

• time-line for the definition of the next federal message on education, research and innovation
• integrating refugees into higher education (project by the national students union VSS/UNES)

On 12 May, actionuni co-presidents met with Christoph Grollimund, director of the Swiss Agency for Accreditation and Quality Assurance, AAQ. It was agreed to meet twice a year for an informal exchange on topics around the ongoing accreditation processes, timeline and challenges as experienced by the AAQ.