The First Online Meeting of the National Higher Education Reform Experts network of the EU Erasmus+ Programme (19-20.09.2023, online)
On 19-20 September 2023, the first virtual meeting of the HERE network, National Erasmus+ Offices and SPHERE (Centralised Support to the Network of Higher Education Reform Experts), EACEA took place to provide a space for exchanging practices, gathering information, and brainstorming across the entire HERE network. The HERE teams assessed progress in implementing their action plans, shared their results, and discussed best practices of HEREs from different countries. SPHERE presented the planned activities for 2023-2024, including international seminars and conferences for HERE teams, and the specifics of organising events with the support of Technical Assistance Missions (TAM), work on the mid-term evaluation of the EU Erasmus+ Programme. Representatives of the European Commission’s Directorate-General on Education, Youth, Sport and Culture (DG EAC), the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA), and the European University Association (EUA) presented current priorities, policies, and programmes of the European Commission, including opportunities, initiatives, and resources of the Erasmus+ Programme.
The two-day work of the first virtual meeting focused primarily on issues of organising the HERE team to ensure impact on the national higher education system, developing national action plans, and preparing successful project proposals for TAM.
The session “Organising the HERE Team for impact” included two presentations on team structure, approaches to interaction, examples, and organisational ideas for effective team management, as well as tips for new National Erasmus+ Offices and HERE on enhancing the impact of HERE activities in their respective countries. The speakers were Svitlana SHYTIKOVA, Coordinator of the National Erasmus+ Office – Ukraine with the presentation “Organising the National HERE Team for Impact in Ukraine” and Prof. Diane NAUFFAL, HERE – Lebanon.
A separate session was devoted to the presentation of SPHERE publication 2023: Greening in Higher Education, which will cover European trends in Greening, and it is scheduled to be published in February 2024. The summary results of this study will be presented in December 2023 during the Annual HERE Conference.
The event was attended by 113 participants from different Bologna Process countries, including 11 representatives of the National HERE team – Ukraine (Volodymyr BAKHRUSHYN, Yuriy RASHKEVYCH, Olena KOZIEVSKA, Volodymyr LUGOVYY, Svitlana KALASHNIKOVA, Andriy STAVYTSKYY, Irina SIKORSKAYA, Iryna ZOLOTARYOVA, student Maria MYSHLOVSKA, as well as Oleh SHAROV and Maryna MRUGA, Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine) and four representatives of the National Erasmus+ Office — Ukraine (Svitlana SHYTIKOVA, Zhanna TALANOVA, Veronika TKACHENKO, Petro KRAINIK).