Please engage in the discussion regarding potential issues or needs related to the EIT Urban Mobility Master School. The aim is to identify potential areas for the call to focus on. Please discuss addressable issues and needs you see and what you think are causing these. Potential solutions will be discussed later. In essence the question is: What areas should we focus our budget on to maximize the impact of the EIT Urban Mobility Master School?
The main aim for the EIT Labelled master school programmes is to drive innovation and entrepreneurship capabilities through training and by supporting startup generating activities. The EIT Urban Mobility Master School programmes includes 30 ECTS of innovation and entrepreneurship courses as well as studies at two European universities. For more information please click here.
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From experience of previous calls and the present status and development we are here suggesting a number of potential areas. Please suggest additional issues and needs to address if you find something missing. Focus on the problem and need, not pushing solutions. In general we look for activities and initiatives that can grow our Master School, increase impact per EUR and increase the number of student generated startups.
- Summer Schools
- We aim to run 2 to 3 summer schools in 2023. These will be primarily for our own Master School students, but will also be open for any paying students within urban mobility related studies as well as young professionals.
- Marketing and Awareness-raising
- In general we need to increase the awareness of the EIT Urban Mobility Master school among Bachelor level students. There is also a general need for marketing activities increasing the number of students applying.
- Teaching methodology development across universities
- Driven by the EIT Label ambitions we look for new effective and efficient teaching methodologies fitting the need within the Master School with a strong focus on innovation and entrepreneurship and knowledge triangle integration.
- Student startup activities
- We see a need to further strengthen encouragement and the support given to students interested in creating new ventures.
- Suggest an issue or need to discuss
- Please suggest other relevant issues and needs to address and discuss and in line with what is stated above. What you think are issues and needs to focus on on to maximize the impact of the EIT Urban Mobility Academy activities.
EIT Urban Mobility Academy Calls 
We need more women to participate in and apply to our EIT labelled master school programmes. Urban mobility related professions still largely dominated by men, so what is missing for women to engage in education studies that lead to these jobs?
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We need more structured activities to stimulate and deliver knowledge-triangle integration in more urban mobility master-level courses.
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– Awareness-raising not only for the Master School but for Innovation and Entrepreneurship is important – especially among engineering students
– Knowledge triangle integration with focus on engineers important; with new methods and tools? I.e., knowledge sharing/best-practice-exchange
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We need more learner-centered education, which would provide positive experience for students, and also engage the wider learning community in knowledge and identity development.
Development of such education approach requires from us to establish a comprehensive methodology for program assessment, which should be based also on diverse stakeholders and alumni perspectives. And comprehensive does not mean 100s of hours of work, as these methods can be implemented in one day or half a day workshop, once a year.
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Hi Milos,
Very good point. Do you have any examples of such learner centered education program related to Urban Mobility?
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Learner-centered education has existed in certain MSc programs around the world, but maybe not in this field. So, good examples are elsewhere. However, we need to develop our programs from within, with program assessment, not just by transfer of experiences.
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The Calls could be an opportunity to produce a richer scheme of content and assessment, perhaps an example can be the Charm.EU master programme development where the development itself was well-funded and had structured outputs.
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Forgot to include the link: https://www.charm-eu.eu/masters/globalchallenges/programmestructure
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One idea is to specifically fund the development of a programme assessment scheme for our master school. Yes we will already do this but at current resources it will be rather conventional, whereas it would be worth exploring best practice and coming up with advancements, with some resources.
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We need to ensure continuation of the solutions created on ideation sessions. The courses and projects usually have an abrupt end.
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Hi Balazs,
I fully agree. Any recommendations based on your own experience regarding how to ensure the continuation of projects/ideation sessions/hackathons etc. after they end/after funding stops?
Asking people to include a part on “how the project will continue after the funding stops” in their project application is more and more common and could help, but what else can be done?
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We need to encourage and support remote or distributed teams in entrepreneurship or project work. In the past 2 years new team dynamics skills emerged, which we need to leverage on.
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We need to complement existing curriculum with challenge based learning in the non I&E – STEM education fields to encourage hands on learning.
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Hi Akos,
Good point! Any good practices / examples you could refer us to?
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We need to strengthen networking skills and strategies.
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Agreed. But how can this be done efficiently for Master students?
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Adopting a harmonized open data and tools in challenge based education over the full EIT UM master school and have the different universities work with standardized sustainable urban mobility indicators and city descriptions in their project work. Students working on various cities in EU describe & analyze them in a standard manner for comparison. Would link to similar strategies in industry & EC (eg neutral frameworks, open data, sustainable urban mobility indicators).
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There could be a need to attract more students from RIS countries and this may also be linked to the adjustment of the fee policy depending on the origin of the students
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There is a need to reflect on which entrepreneurial skills are added-value to students in the domain of urban mobility compared to existing masters and have the industry/employer perspective on this (entrepreneur vs innovator vs change maker, differences in I&E approach in digital vs UM).
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An interesting question is what does entrepreneurship means in urban mobility since urban mobility is quite a complex industry, can it be even called an ‘industry area’ considering the variety of professions, fields, expertise needed make cities run in terms of mobility?
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Also, students leaving university from transport fields are usually engineers, planners… so ow to motivate these types of profiles to innovate and become entrepreneurs? maybe by better matching this profiles with business schools, which on the other hand have difficulties to comprehend urban mobility as a subject. This can create synergies and opportunities for complementary/mutual learning methodologies ..
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It would be fantastic to see a master program that leverages the richness of the local context they are in. A great draw to a cross-university program would be having the students discover intensively what urban mobility means to each city. Some are world class at transit, others at walkability, others at cycling. Especially excited to see how we can engage students in the remakingthestreet.com course with TUM/Humankind in Munich/Rotterdam. Can this model be scaled up to a few months instead of a week?
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^ comment by George Liu, Cycling Research Review
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This might be an idea to develop as part of the upcoming EIT Fellowship model – develop a short programme that complements a master degree.
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Or alternatively a new full-fledged master programme with a focus on urban design/landscape architecture for streets. This is an area we’ve discussed but need to find interested experts.
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On summer schools: some better synchronisation between the summer school hosts and master school partners is needed to avoid scheduling issues. Let’s find out early what the calendar constraints are, and let the summer school host teams propose formats that meet those constraints; but also give them some more freedom to innovate on the format.
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Let’s have a point specifically targeted toward the upcoming EIT Fellowship model – partners propose formats/concepts that could be piloted – either as a complement to a master degree, or as a part of a master degree outside the consortium.
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Thanks one and all for your questions and ideas. We have a lot now to work with and will move on to articulating more coherently our needs in the call for proposals. To start I’ve tried to summarise the comments above perhaps more succinctly.
Priority Areas for the Call for Proposals
• Awareness-raising events and initiatives, rather open-ended to encourage creative approaches
• Refined summer school call item, addressing practical issues such as scheduling and outputs for examination
• A comprehensive methodology for learner-based programme assessment and follow-up development needs to be developed and implemented
• Development of a common repository of cases, methods, data, tolls, etc. for use across the partner universities’ courses
• Pilot a new scheme that would lead to the upcoming EIT Fellowship Label, enabling shorter, more individualised pathways to fulfilling the Label requirements
• Development of new programme concepts in areas not yet addressed: landscape architecture/urban design; mobility product design and engineering; city logistics
Cross-Cutting Issues to Permeate all Call Items
• The gender balance in master programme participation is still not meeting our objective. A key component in all our funded activities, not least around recruitment, needs to be how gender mainstreaming is integrated. Likewise geographic diversity (e.g. EU, RIS, non-EU)
• The integration of Innovation and Entrepreneurship skills specifically into Urban Mobility needs to be both better articulated to applicants and more explicitly addressed in the master programmes as implemented, building on the ongoing work to contextualise the EIT’s Overarching Learning Outcomes.
• Knowledge-Triangle Integration should permeate not only the implementation of the programmes but also the design, planning, and strategic direction of the master school – not least in helping shape the above point on integrating I&E into Urban Mobility
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At the University of Rennes 1 we have proposed an activity in which we have added value to a summer school by shifting some of its regular activities to autumn.
This proposal invites students to spend a full week in July and a 4-day long weekend in October.
The bi-seasonal experience is intended to be executed in two different destinations, for example, in Rennes, France, and Italy, Milan, making the summer school even more attractive for students.
This proposal implies at least three advantages: a) the coordination teams avoid wasting time in relocating students from one destination to another; b) students have more time for their own summer holidays (since it only implies only 1 week in July); and c) EIT UM students engage in two events instead of one, which may be perceived as more beneficial.
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