Autumn Challenge | University of Twente

AN INSPIRING AUTUMN EXPERIENCE to CONNECT universities AND WORK TOWARDS CREATING SMART, RESILIENT AND HAPPY COMMUNITIES!

What was the programme about?

The ''smart, resilient and happy communities'' Autumn Challenge Experience Programme was a unique, alternative international experience organised by the University of Twente and powered by ECIU University that ran in autumn 2020 and 2021. The Autumn Challenge was a flexible, international programme aimed at engaged learners with a vision to make a change in their communities and regions. This programme could be followed aside from your regular curriculum and will take place fully online. It offered the opportunity for learners to come together in an international, collaborative and digital environment to work on a real-life challenge and co-develop solutions, while at the same time accessing various lectures, workshops, masterclasses and other fun activities.

With this programme, we aimed to engage learners and take them “outside” of their regular classroom and “inside” the real world. Here we presented them with real challenges and projects offered by public and private stakeholders. At the same time, we wanted to address the needs of students to interact with peers and other learners despite the physical mobility restrictions. For this purpose, we created an unconventional learning environment that was not bound by physical location and other constraints, with flexible education formats, extracurricular virtual activities and other informal formats of education.

In this way, we wanted to support students, sustain their wellbeing and allow them to become agents of change by bringing them together to discuss and dive into important topics that have an impact on our communities, both locally and globally!

Autumn challenge in numbers

71 participants
26 nationalities
10 universities (University of Twente, University of Trento, Autonomous University of Barcelona, University of Tampere, University of Stavanger, INSA Toulouse, University of Linkoping, Kaunas University of Technology, Tec de Monterrey, University of Münster)
14 challenges
14 Virtual Teams
13 Thematic Lectures & 12 Skills Labs