EduBase: Sharing Good Practices

Find out more about good practices and benefit from our experience.

Debates, Labs and Co.

Here you can find a selection of past activities and educational formats developed and implemented over the past few years within U!REKA. We will regularly add new projects and offer impulses for further educational ideas.  

Erasmus+ BIP

This selection of U!REKA Erasmus+ Bended Intensive Programmes offers insights as this format is a great opportunity for short term international exchange that includes online and live components.

The U!REKA Change Agent Program is an interdisciplinary and intercultural initiative designed to equip students with the skills and tools to tackle sustainability challenges co-organized in Amsterdam and Helsinki in co-operation with partners from Frankfurt, Ghent and Odessa.

This blended program combines online sessions with an intensive in-person experience in one of the cities. The program is an excellent example of international collaboration, showcasing how cross-border teamwork can address global challenges like sustainability while fostering transformative personal and professional growth. To this end U!REKA Change Agents works with the following key elements:

Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Students from diverse cultural and academic backgrounds work in cross-cultural teams to address challenges related to sustainability and societal transformation.

Focus on Sustainability: The program emphasizes solving systemic issues like sustainable water use, integrating socio-cultural, economic, and climate-related perspectives.

Blended Learning Approach: It includes online sessions focused on remote innovation, design thinking, and cross-cultural collaboration, culminating in a week-long field trip featuring workshops, city explorations, and stakeholder interactions.

Practical Outcomes: Participants design, prototype, and present innovative solutions, applying tools such as design thinking and storytelling. They also build professional networks and engage in peer-to-peer learning.

Certification and Impact: Upon successful completion, participants receive a certificate and bring their learnings and prototypes back to their local contexts for further development.

As part of the U!REKA Lab: Co-Creativity in Social Arts Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programmes (BIP) were realized in Frankfurt (2023), Groningen (2024) and Helsinki (2025).

Students and teachers from Edinburgh, Frankfurt, Ghent, Groningen and Helsinki met online and live in order to exchange about their work between arts and the social, their use of artistic media and how they approach the people they are working with. Through excursions, work-place and visits and common visits to exhibitions and cultural events students learn about each other’s study and working realities and the special situation in the host cities.

In workshops, co-conducted by teams of international teachers, different approaches, media, and methods are explored and student groups present their quest for “common grounds” in exhibitions and presentations. These online and intensive live exchanges are described as very influential for professional development and study realities.

Further information

The partners of the U!REKA Lab: Urban Commons have realized a number of summer schools and Erasmus+ BIPs in Frankfurt (2021), Helsinki (2022) & Ostrava (2023, 2024, 2025).

These blended exchanges are oriented at actual challenges in the respective host cities and bring together students and teachers for intensive work on these issues. The aim is to develop and propose sustainable and commons-based solutions in international and interdisciplinary teams and to present these findings to relevant stakeholders in the cities. We plan to continue thes BIPs in 2025 and 2026.

Further information

COIL

COILs can be used in many different ways. We offer you insights into our debates that we have organised with students from U!REKA partner universities.

The course “We Need to Talk! Arguments – Perspectives – Current Controversies. U!REKA Debates”, offered at Frankfurt UAS and HOGENT, later also at IPL, integrates a fully digital format with team teaching, international collaboration, and interdisciplinary topics, all through the medium of structured debates.

The course is designed to address how education for sustainability can be implemented in a transnational learning environment. Debating, which requires the exploration of multiple perspectives, is central to this goal. The digital format allows for the inclusion of external experts and international partners. The course begins with an introduction to debating, led by Jens Henning Fischer, President of the German Debating Society. This session covers both theoretical concepts and practical exercises to familiarize students with debate techniques.

Subsequent sessions focus on the theme of “Dominance”, where students engage with materials such as the documentary “The Post-Racist Planet” and learning videos covering topics like dominance in urban planning and economics. These videos, produced by instructors from both universities, are available with subtitles in both German and English to ensure accessibility. The materials are provided alongside weekly tasks and reflection exercises designed to support students throughout the course.

In synchronous online sessions, students work in small groups to apply different pedagogical methods such as think-pair-share and develop arguments for debate questions like “Should participation in urban planning be bypassed for renewable energy projects?”. Breakout sessions and digital collaboration tools help structure the students’ work, and the debates themselves follow the Oxford format, with arguments presented by pro and contra groups, and evaluated by a student jury.

This course is part of the “Interdisciplinary General Studies” module, a required component for all bachelor students at Frankfurt UAS, and aims to develop interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration. The flexibility of the course design allows for future expansion, with plans to include additional institutions. The content can be adapted by adding new thematic elements or revising existing ones.

Further information:

https://www.ureka.eu/shared-content/news/news/2022/12/ureka-debates.html

Lecture Series

Online lecture series are a brilliant way to bring together people from a large network on more general or very specific topics.

From 2021 to 2023 the online U!R Commons Lecture Series organized by the U!REKA Lab: Urban Commons invited experts and practitioners of Commons and Commoning and attracted audiences of students, academics and citizens from and beyond the U!REKA partner institutions. This enriched the ongoing international Commons Course of the Lab and fostered the contact with external stakeholders and guests. Each participating U!REKA university took over responsibility for hosting one event per year (invitation of speakers, introduction, moderation), all institutions reached out to attract visitors, while the registration and hosting of the video conferences remained in the hands of one of the partners.

Further information:

U!REKA Labs

U!REKA Labs bring together teachers, experts and students for longer-term international and interdisciplinary collaboration. These communities can help to build up networks, acquire condense knowledge, and offer opportunities to work together and in teaching and research.  

The U!REKA Lab: Urban Commons is an international and interdisciplinary teaching and research project of the U!REKA European University partners Amsterdam, Ghent, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Lisbon, VSB Ostrava and Ostrava University (external partner).

Since 2019 the Lab has been focusing intensively on urban commons in theory and practice and how cities can develop into more sustainable, liveable, inclusive and (basic) democratic urban spaces. In an innovative blended-learning environment, students and lecturers examine various commons initiatives in the cities, such as communal housing projects, energy collectives, self-managed cultural projects, common kitchen initiatives or urban gardens.

We organize the U!R Commons Lectures, exhibitions, summer schools, short-term mobilities, such as Erasmus+ BIPs as well as an online knowledge platform.

In 2024 the lab was releasing a documentary video on the work in the past 5 years and a publication on the exemplary educational and research collaboration.

Further information

In the U!REKA Lab: Co-Creativity in Social Arts teachers and students from artistic and social oriented study fields of the U!REKA universities in Helsinki, Ghent, Edinburgh and Frankfurt, together with partners from Groningen (Hanze UAS), have developed an ongoing collaboration in order to exchange knowledge on the nexus of the arts and the social.

The Lab focuses on the further development and transfer of participatory approaches and methods of artistic-ethnographic research and aesthetic education and cultural wellbeing into urban society. In projects of research-based learning and research-oriented cultural education, we investigate social fields and facets of the city in cooperation with local actors. Citizens are involved in research processes as experts of their social spaces and actively participate in shaping these processes. The transfer of artistic-research methods into the urban society not only generates new knowledge but also opens up new participatory ways of acting and possibilities of exchange in the sense of a co-creative sustainable design of urbanity – on the way to inclusive cities of the future.

So far international visits, COIL projects and BIPs were realized. The structure and contents of the events were co-developed with the students and complemented with on-site excursions and the invitation of practitioners and stakeholders. In this collective development, we see opportunities to make education more inclusive, practical and challenge-oriented, while fostering international and interdisciplinary exchange.

Our projects:

  • Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), organised by Helsinki (2022) 
  • Blended Intensive Programmes (BIP): Frankfurt (2023), Groningen (2024), Helsinki (2025) 
  • International excursions & workplace visits 
  • Staff mobilities, visits and presentations at International Weeks
U!REKA.

Any questions?
Find our contacts here!

Sign up to our newsletter
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.
Frankfurt UAS.
Hogent university.
Lisboa school.
Metropolia University of Applied Sciences.
Technical University of Ostrava.
Co-funded by the EU logo.
@ 2025 U!REKA