On 10-11 April 2024, the first and the largest conference on dual higher education in the history of the European Education Area, initiated by the EU4DUAL European University Alliance, took place in Malta on the basis of Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology (MCAST).
The conference created a common strategic platform, having brought together European officials, heads of international organizations, academic experts, industry leaders, university representatives and civil society around the issue of building an integrated transnational European Dual University. Keynote speeches were delivered by Iliana Ivanova, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, Professor Jon Altuna, Coordinator of the EU4DUAL European University Alliance, Professor Nora McRae, Co-Chair of the World Association for Cooperative Education (WACE), Vice-Chancellor of the University of Waterloo, John Edwards, Secretary General of EURASHE: The European Association of Institutions in Higher Education, and Markus Tomaschitz, Chief Human Resources Officer and Company Spokesperson of AVL, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of FH JOANNEUM, University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria.
Thanks to fruitful cooperation with the Alliance in 2023 through the mediation of the Koszalin University of Technology (Poland), in early 2024 Ivan Franko National University of Lviv signed an agreement on the one-year EU4DUAL4UKRAINE project within the Alliance with the financial support of the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA). Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University have also joined the project.
The new format of EU4DUAL4UKRAINE project cooperation made it possible for the representatives of Lviv University to participate in this landmark conference, including Dean of the Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Informatics, Professor Ivan Dyyak, Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Informatics, Associate Professor Vitaliy Horlatch, Dean of the Faculty of Electronics and Computer Technologies, Associate Professor Yuriy Furgala, Director of the Center for English-language Academic and Cross-Cultural Communication and EU4DUAL4UKRAINE project co-coordinator, Associate Professor, Iryna Odrekhivska, and PhD in Philology, Lecturer at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and the Center for English-language Academic and Cross-Cultural Communication Anna Halas.
It is important to mention that the conference delegates already have a successful experience of cooperation with the Alliance and the represented faculties partially implement dual programs. For example, thanks to the partnership, in 2023 a joint virtual laboratory of intercultural communication was created along with the reference book Handbook of Intercultural Communication (ISBN 978-617-10-0827-4 DOI 10.30970/hic.2023), the bilingual collective monograph Дуальна форма здобуття вищої освіти: європейський досвід, український контекст та практики реалізації в Львівському університеті/ Dual Higher Education: European Experience, Ukrainian Context and Implementation Practices at Lviv University was published: European Experience, Ukrainian Context and Implementation Practices at Lviv University (ISBN 978-617-10-0836-6; DOI 10.30970/dhe.2023) and other manuals. A number of study visits to universities in France, Spain, Hungary, Croatia and Poland were organised as well.
Today, one of the ambitions of EU4DUAL is to establish the Center of Excellence in Dual Higher Education, which will generate practices for the future talent market needs and offer solutions to global challenges in cooperation with students. This will be a significant component for the realisation of a constructive and sustainable dialogue with Lviv University, as coordinator Jon Altuna emphasised during the negotiations with the delegates of our university. In general, the Center will cover research, knowledge exchange and capacity building in the field of dual education, both within the consortium and beyond.
Following the conference, Ivan Dyyak said, “The EU4DUAL Alliance represents 588 university campuses around the world and more than 50 dual programs already implemented by its members, while the Alliance also includes 35 leading business companies from each member state that want to promote the innovative model of dual education and create future talents for the market. This model makes it possible to start joint ecosystem research projects that support the achievement of the Alliance’s program goals and to launch innovative educational programs.”
Vitaliy Horlatch also shares his impressions: “It is interesting that for the consolidated vision of the European Dual University development and its further scaling, it is planned to create a tutor training program for the dual form of higher education (for example, for industry representatives). I was also most impressed by the formats of cooperation with companies at the French university ESTIA, especially the tandem with the sports company Decathlon.”
Yuriy Furgala adds that the Alliance’s ecosystem solutions for launching joint master’s and doctoral dual programmes for obtaining the pan-European degree (for example, the European MA degree in Engineering) are productive, and here double degree practices can be a practical option for Ukraine.
In fact, as Iryna Odrekhivska outlines, “the EU4DUAL Alliance also plans to create the international exchange programme that will allow students to take advantage of international exchange for workplace training. To this end, procedures for cross-border monitoring and evaluation of internships will be developed, as well an employer recognition and accreditation scheme between educational institutions, which will collectively generate a database of international (virtual and physical) workplace learning opportunities collected from the Alliance’s list of sectoral partners. The Alliance also plans to initiate double degree programmes, for which a unique structure will be agreed between EU4DUAL partners, including the use of local languages and exposure to local culture. At least two partners are already collaborating on each double degree programme. It is worth mentioning that EU4DUAL also plans to create a microcredit platform to implement the concept of lifelong learning, which may become an additional vector of partnership with Ivan Franko National University.” Anna Halas and Iryna Odrekhivska also made a joint presentation at the conference on the model of “gradual transition” to the dual format of education for social sciences and humanities through the integration of interdisciplinary courses based on modelling and solving real projects from Industry 5.0.
At the final roundtable of the conference, Evarist Martolo, former Minister of Education and Science of Malta, summarised that dual education is the education of the future, as it harmoniously brings into focus the core values: “learning to know, learning to do, learning to be, learning to live with others”.
The materials of the joint project publication (Ukrainian version) Дуальна форма здобуття вищої освіти: європейський досвід, український контекст та практики реалізації в Львівському університеті (2023) are available here: https://www.tu.koszalin.pl/attachments/495.
The programme and published materials of the conference are available here: https://eu4dual.education/malta-conference/.
