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The European Learning & Teaching Forum is an EUA event that provides an opportunity for participants to meet and discuss developments in learning and teaching at European universities. The Forum builds on EUA’s work with its member universities on this topic. Alongside the bottom-up approach, the Forum makes use of EUA’s extensive policy work in European higher education. The Forum is an ideal event for vice-rectors for academic affairs, deans, and management involved in learning and teaching. It also welcomes students, policy-makers and other stakeholders in higher education.
Through a mix of plenary and parallel sessions, the Forum provides a platform for discussion on how universities enhance learning and teaching, while also presenting the work of the 2022 EUA Learning & Teaching Thematic Peer Groups.
PHOTOS OF THE EVENT ARE NOW AVAILABLE!
WELCOME FROM THE RECTOR
Since its inception in 1886, our university has striven to maintain its mission as an educational institution committed to the humanistic and social development of society. The University of Deusto managed to persevere through difficult economic, social and political times, keeping its mission and alma mater alive: to nurture each other and humanise the world. As a result, we now have campuses in Bilbao, San Sebastian, Vitoria and Madrid that offer undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in all fields of study that embrace teaching excellence, internationalisation, diversity, inclusion and digital transformation as cross-cutting values.
But today, more than ever, we need to be able to adapt to a world in profound and continuous change. For some years now, we have been living through a scientific-technological revolution that is generating a total alteration of the system. Moreover, what initially could be understood as a dimension connatural to the evolution of history itself, has acquired an unexpected magnitude due to unprecedented phenomena such as the pandemic that emerged in 2020, which forced universities to urgently adapt to distance learning; accelerating important processes of change. Nor can we ignore the deep and widespread crisis associated with it and, more recently, the war in Ukraine, with its unforeseeable economic and geopolitical consequences.
It is therefore particularly timely to meet, reflect and discuss all the questions that challenge us all as higher education leaders in Europe. How can new technologies actually improve learning and teaching processes? The time has come to reflect, experiment and assess the benefits of digital technology in education, but always bearing in mind that technologies are a means to education, not an end.
We must not let the current crisis distract us and make us forget our focus on students as main actors and drivers of change, on active listening to students. However, this does not mean that technology is not important. Rather, it means that technological transformation should help us to better respond to our challenges as a learning, educational and research organisation.
José María Guibert S.J.
ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF DEUSTO
The University of Deusto was inaugurated in 1886. The concerns and cultural interest of the Basque Country in having its own university, as well as the interest of the Jesuits in establishing higher studies in some part of the Spanish State coincided in its conception. Nowadays, Bilbao is the centre of a metropolitan area with more than one million inhabitants, a city traditionally open to Europe.
The central headquarters of the University of Deusto is located on the opposite side of the estuary, facing the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, an emblematic symbol of the significant transformation of Bilbao during the last three decades. In 1916, the “Universidad Comercial de Deusto” received a group of students who would be the first graduates in Economic Sciences in Spain.
Beyond individual projects and research, which is coordinated from chairs such as Law and the Human Genome, Leisure and Disabilities, there is a clear option for the social topics of interdependency, distribution of resources, migration, human rights, development, poverty and environment, ethics and society at the university. Studies on cultural identity (individual and collective), and European integration processes are being carried out by various international research groups.
The institution is located on two campuses: Bilbao and San Sebastian with headquarters in Madrid and Vitoria. It counts 10,000 students, 600 professors and 1,200 invited professors. As a Jesuit University, Deusto is a part of an international network, formed by 202 educational institutions that provide a pedagogical tradition centred on the person as having essential value.
ABOUT BILBAO
A city with plenty of charisma and personality, it is traditional and avant-garde at the same time. From the narrow streets of the Casco Viejo (Old Town) to the Gran Vía and the New Bilbao, there is a whole world of history and legends that have turned the small port on the banks of the river into a world benchmark. A friendly space for those who are interested in innovation, architecture, art, technology, design, leisure, gastronomy and culture.
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao kicked off a ground swell of creativity that Bilbao has successfully used to create an innovative and contemporary architectural jigsaw, both in terms of the shapes and the use of materials. These universal works offer an overview of world architecture in the first decades of the 21st Century.
Finally, Bilbao is an international point of reference in terms of cuisine. The excellent restaurants, found throughout the city, transform good meals into an art form. Restaurants like Azurmendi, Mina and Nerua, Etxanobe and Zortziko are distinctive for their Michelin Stars - a symbol of creative gastronomy and haute cuisine.
