The UU Team Award is meant for teams that have made an extraordinary impact on higher education. The CHARM-EU Master’s was launched in September 2021 and tests innovative didactic concepts with transdisciplinary challenge-based learning at its core. It offers hybrid teaching with students and teachers synchronously interacting across five universities, including Utrecht University.

The Master’s programme is the first ever joint degree programme as part of a European Universities Initiative. The Master’s was developed as a testbed for educational innovation and institutional transformations for Open Science by the now nine CHARM-EU partners. For this, CHARM-EU created an open environment with interuniversity and transdisciplinary Knowledge Creating Teams of teachers, educationalists, societal stakeholders and students who creatively designed modules. The Master’s thus pushes the boundaries of many educational innovations, including interdisciplinary, challenge-based and community-engaged learning with the use of virtual learning environments and hybrid classrooms.

During the Master’s, students move from campus to campus with phase, short-term and virtual mobility enabling transnational and intercultural learning. Students build transversal skills through joint learning processes with external stakeholders. This happens for example in the final Capstone phase, in which student teams across the five universities address sustainability challenges submitted by stakeholders (NGOs, businesses and (inter)governmental agencies), with field work across Europe and Africa.

Marjanneke Vijge, Utrecht programme leader of the Master’s about winning the UU Team Award: “This is a great recognition for the entire CHARM-EU team. It proves that the Master’s is not just an innovative program, but also has large added-value in the wider field of higher education and Open Science that extends beyond Utrecht University and the Netherlands. I am especially excited about the Master’s as a testbed for transdisciplinary challenge-based education and research, where we work together with external stakeholders, students and university staff to address sustainability challenges. In the new phase of CHARM-EU, our current experiences with the interuniversity research hubs and the Capstone phase of the Master’s will be replicated and scaled up in global (mixed) classrooms and an interuniversity sustainability challenge platform across (associate) partners in Europe, Africa and Latin America. In this way, we continue to contribute to sustainability transformations across Europe and the Global South.”

Winning the UU Team Award will allow the team to submit a proposal on behalf of Utrecht University to the Dutch Education Award, which is awarded yearly by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) to an innovative education team that realizes special impact for students, teachers and the education field. Winning the UU Team Award also comes with one thousand euros to spend on a team activity, workshop or training of the team’s choice, as well as guidance from the Centre for Academic Teaching and Learning to further develop a proposal for the Dutch Education Award.