actionuni der Schweizer Mittelbau / actionuni le corps intermédiaire académique suisse / actionuni il collegio intermediario academico svizzero represents young researchers as well as the associations of non-professorial academic staff of the Swiss cantonal universities, the Federal Institutes of Technology, the Swiss Universities of Applied Sciences, and the Swiss Universities of Teacher Education on the Swiss national as well as the international level. actionuni’s objectives are to improve the academic career tracks and to coordinate the activities of the Swiss associations of non-professorial academic staff.
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We are looking for two delegates to represent actionuni at the EURODOC Conference (Topic: “Open Science”) and EURODOC Annual General Meeting 26.-29. April 2017 in Oslo.
For information see http://eurodoc-oslo2017.org/
Coverage of travel expenses is possible.
Interested candidates please submit a short expression of interest to president@actionuni.ch until March 24th (at the latest).
The next Assembly of Delegates takes place on 10 May 2017 in Bern at UniS, room A301, time 16:00-18:30, followed by an Apero.
The Agenda will be sent out early April.
Young researchers at the University of St. Gallen will give themselves a new organizational structure. A telephone interview by the responsible journalist from the St. Galler Tagblatt with Florian Lippke gave us the chance to welcome these new developments and to stress the importance of well-defined conditions for the researchers who are actively involved.
The article can be found here.
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.
Just before the discussion on the mass immigration initiative in the parliament, actionuni co-president Andrea Tamas gave an interview to the German radio station Deutschlandfunk. She stressed the relevancy of the ratification of the Croatia protocol within the timeframe given by the EU to not loose association to the European research program Horizon2020.
The short broadcast can be found here.
Co-presidents Florian Lippke and Andrea Tamas attended the 1st 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:
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:
actionuni has given feedback to the proposed financing scheme within the HFKG. For Universities of Applied Sciences, the model 85/15 is preferred unanimously, implying a moderate shift towards giving research a higher importance. Among the members of the universities, no clear consent was reached which financing model should be used.
A second feedback was requested regarding the topic of a simplified second accreditation process for universities, which have passed a first accreditation without obligations. actionuni supports the position of the Swiss Accreditation Council to postpone the decision whether and how a simplified accreditation process should be implemented until 2019 once more experience about the new accreditation system has been gathered.
The Annual Report was published as well as the Mission Statement (Leitbild) of actionuni.