The three-day Czeducon conference was organised by the Czech National Agency for International Education and Research for the sixth time and it annually attracts hundreds of experts from Czech universities and from abroad. They regularly come to the conference to expand their knowledge, discover new trends and opportunities, share good practice and at the same time establish cooperation across Europe.
This year, conference participants were treated to a total of 60 lectures, workshops and debates focused on four main thematic areas: internationalisation for all; the digital age; support, care and well-being; and cooperation within and outside the academic sphere. Masaryk University made five contributions to the conference.
On Tuesday, November 19, dozens of interested people came to listen to Tomáš Varga from the Support Centre for Students with Special Needs (Teiresiás). At Czeducon, he shared Teiresias' experience with short-term mobility of students with special needs. Last year MU sent almost 30 of these abroad and welcomed another 12. In his lecture, he spoke not only about the challenges faced by students and educational institutions and the benefits that mobility brings to students, but also, among other things, about LangSkills international summer schools for deaf and hearing-impaired students.
Vice-rector for Internationalisation Petr Suchý spoke at the conference about volunteering at MU and the MUNI HELPS Volunteer Centre. “Volunteering is a very powerful tool through which the university can fulfil its social role and initiate positive change in society. I myself have experience with the Texas volunteer programme where I worked as a kindergarten teacher's aide for a year, and I must say that it was an extremely rewarding year for me. That is why I am very proud that the MUNI HELPS initiative was created here at Masaryk University and that our students are involved in volunteer activities and have helped even during the crises we have encountered in recent years, whether a pandemic, the war in Ukraine or tornadoes and floods. Recent years have clearly shown that volunteering has its place at Masaryk University,” he said in his contribution.
The joint discussion of Masaryk University, Mendel University and the University of Economics on the topic of the Staff Week Tradition: Building Bridges for International Collaboration also attracted many interested people. In it, Martin Vašek from the Welcome Office at the Centre for International Cooperation spoke, sharing with the audience his experience in the organisation of MUST Week (Masaryk University Staff Training Week).
“Week-long educational placements have a long-standing tradition at Masaryk University - we have been organising them for more than twenty years. Right from the beginning, we tried to thematically focus them on certain agendas and do several runs, for example for workers from foreign departments, libraries or departments focused on science and research, technology transfer or accreditation. Every year at MUST Week, we get very positive responses not only from foreign colleagues, but also from colleagues from MU, for whom joint meetings and sharing of good practice are a great opportunity to develop our workplaces,” explained Martin Vašek.
In the afternoon block, Athena Alchazidu from the MU Language Centre presented the new EPSULA project, in which Masaryk University cooperates with six universities from Ecuador, El Salvador, Spain and Finland. “In the last 50 years, dozens of indigenous languages have disappeared in Latin America. To preserve at least some of them, we are creating the EPSULA multilingual portal, which will not only help preserve indigenous languages for future generations but will also serve as a source of educational materials intended primarily for students of Spanish and the tourism industry. In addition, it will also represent a valuable database for linguists and anthropologists,” explained Athena Alchazidu, and during the lecture she also showed several videos created thanks to an EU-funded project.
The series of contributions ended with a joint presentation from Masaryk University and the University of Antwerp on summer and winter schools. “At MU, we have been organizing several-week summer schools for over fourteen years centrally, which attract more and more students to Brno. Summer and winter programs from Antwerp, which welcome around seven hundred participants every year, offer a different, larger perspective. Short-term education programs are a very interesting opportunity for universities, so we thought that we could share our experiences at Czeducon together with our colleague Evelien Peeten from Antwerp. Our philosophy of short-term programmes are very similar, but we each approach the organization of short-term programs differently, and I think that both models can be very inspiring for others,” explained summer school manager Erin Anna Huták from the MU Center for International Cooperation, explaining the reasons why the universities decided to present together for a second time – the first being in 2021.
This year, the CZEDUCON conference was organised by the Czech National Agency for International Education and Research in conjunction with national agencies from Austria, Germany, Slovakia and Poland. From next year, the organisers plan to rename the conference as CEEDUCON (Central European Conference on Internationalization of Higher Education) and to attract even more foreign experts in the field of international education.
A two-minute video by the Czech National Agency for International Education and Research captures the essence of this year's conference. Presentations of individual speakers are available on the conference website, and video recordings from halls C1 and C3 will also be gradually added.