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In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Study Abroad and Summer School Office of the International Centre has been implementing many international virtual programmes for students at global partner universities and the University of Pécs since early 2020. The programmes include online summer and winter courses, workshops, trainings, collaborative online courses developed with American and Italian universities, and a virtual internship program.

Students from 70 universities in 40 countries from Europe, Asia, the United States and Africa have participated in the virtual programmes. The academic component of the programmes was provided by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Education and Regional Development. In addition to the high- quality academic programmes, exciting social events were also organized for the participants in the evenings.

Among the online short-term programmes, there are courses designed for students in CEEPUS countries.The Study Abroad and Summer School Office could secure a grant from the CEEPUS programme every summer for the past six years, which has been utilized to organize a special 10-day interdisciplinary course about the challenges of the European Union. This opportunity has been offered to students in the Europe from the Visegrad Perspective CEEPUS network. In response to the pandemic, this course was also held online in 2020 and 2021, and it proved to be successful according to the students’ feedback.

The European Association for International Educators (EAIE) is one of the world's largest organisations dedicated to the internationalisation of higher education. It has 2,500 members from 70 countries around the world. Each year, the organisation awards a prize to a European university that has achieved an outstanding and innovative record in internationalisation activities that can serve as a model of good practice for other higher education institutions.

 

The EAIE said the following about the University of Pecs when announcing the award:

“This year’s winner went above and beyond: in response to the pandemic, the University of Pécs, Hungary, quickly acquired a resilient attitude and developed an impressive range of new short-term virtual mobility programmes such as a virtual global internship programme, a COIL project, online summer and winter schools and a career launch strategy training for all students. Their innovative reorganisation paid special attention to creating a community and provides an outstanding example of how to create added value with exciting student-led social programmes.”

The award ceremony will take place at EAIE’s online conference on 1 October 2021.

Last modified: 28-09-2021