Projects

To a Productive, Civic Society through Social Activity

Between 2002 and 2005 Rutgers University and Moldova State University collaborated to develop a Civic Engagement Program Office (CEPO) at MSU and to integrate service-learning across the MSU curriculum. With funding from a United States Department of State NIS College and University Partnerships Program grant, Rutgers and MSU exchanged faculty teams, undertook joint research and faculty development programs, developed shared program management and Internet tools, and extended technical assistance to other universities in Moldova . On May 25, 2004 the MSU University Senate voted to make civic engagement (CEPO) courses a mandatory part of the curriculum in all MSU faculties.

Read more about the Rutgers-Moldova State University project.

ACCELS: Innovations in Higher Education: Bringing Ideas to Life

In May 2004, a Rutgers team partnered with ACCELS Moldova to plan and mount “Innovations in Higher Education: Bringing Ideas to Life,” a working conference targeting faculty, senior administrators—rectors, pro-rectors and deans of faculties—from two dozen universities, as well as ministry officials in Moldova and Ukraine . The conference was designed to assist participants in developing and implementing concrete plans for introducing innovations into the higher education systems in Moldova and Ukraine . Furthermore the conference sought to equip faculty and administrators with the tools and plans to begin transforming institutions of higher learning into leaders in educational development. The conference:

• Fostered an informed discussion of current innovations in higher education including curriculum and administrative developments in both Moldova and Ukraine (summary available on request);
• Identified key problem areas in higher education reform;
• Developed specific action plans to address identified problems (summaries available on request);
• Presented techniques and strategies for introducing new ideas and innovations into the higher educational arena;
• Created post-conference working groups tasked with specific objectives for realizing the plans developed (details of working groups and progress reports available on request);
• Created an action plan for implementing educational reform ideas presented during the conference.

Innovations working groups focused on four critical areas:

• Workforce Development—higher education’s role in creating a workforce trained in skills relevant for opportunities to work in country;
• Collaborative Models—identification of domestic, regional, and international partnerships and opportunities for sharing resources, information, and developing activities in an effort to meet the demands of students and faculty in developing and sustaining university-based centers to provide services;
• International Standards and Credit Transfer—standardization of core programs, graduate studies, credit systems, courses and curricula development in accordance with international documents;
• Techniques and Methodology—analyzing and developing methods of teacher preparation and student evaluation.

Use the following links to access documents from the conference:

• Innovations Workshop
• Innovations Conference Participants
• Innovations Conference Agenda

Service-Learning: Dialogue between Universities and Community (CIVITUS)

In 1999-2000 Rutgers University collaborated with universities in the Baltic region in an effort to improve university-community relations. That project was successful in its own right, but equally important began an ongoing collaboration between Rutgers and two of the original Baltic participants, Kaunas University of Technology and Vytautas Magnus University (VMU) in Kaunas , Lithuania . The current CIVICUS research project is the most recent of these involving Rutgers, Civic Education Project (Hungary), Fundacion General de la Universidad de Valladolid (Spain), European Enterprise Institute (Germany), Jaunimo Karjeros Centras (Lithuania), Universiteit Maastricht (the Netherlands) and Linkoping University (Sweden). With an eye to supporting the accession countries, three core questions drive the research: In the domain of service-learning and university-community integration, what best practices exist in the EU that might be disseminated? What forms of cooperation exist between universities, industries, state administration and civil society, and, specifically, what work-linked teaching/learning methodologies exist and how well do they perform? What opportunities does European integration offer to improve work-linked training? CIVICUS is funded by the European Union under the Leonardo da Vinci program.

Click here to visit the European Union Leonardo da Vinci Programme page.