Universidade Aberta of Portugal organized a new edition of the Erasmus Staff Week from the 24th to the 28th June. This year, thirty one representatives from 24 universities from nine European countries took part in the event: Bulgaria, France, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Spain and Turkey.
This week offered participants an opportunity not only to get to know more about Universidade Aberta, its specific virtual pedagogical model and organizational structure, but also to establish new contacts useful for future partnerships, research projects and new Erasmus mobility flows.
After the Rector Carla Padrel de Oliveira’s welcoming message, the first day was dedicated to introduce Universidade Aberta and the foreign participants, their institutions and the activities they carry out either as academic or non-academic staff.
The program counted with the participation of many professors and non-academic staff of Universidade Aberta, that contributed for the participants to have a deeper insight on teaching and learning issues at a distance education university like Universidade Aberta, as well as its organic structure and its most important concerns: research and open science; open educational resources; open repositories; quality, innovation and digital transformation; microcredentials; sustainability; multimedia production.
Universidade Aberta has two facilities in Lisbon and has a decentralised structure with two delegations in the cities of Coimbra and Porto and 18 Local Learning Centres around the country, mainland and islands. Its students are worldwide, but both national and foreign students living in Portugal can count with the closer assistance of these Local Learning Centres.
Therefore, the program included a day to visit the Local Learning Center in Montijo, a city around 50km away from Lisbon. In the afternoon, the group visited the museum and vineyards of Quinta da Bacalhôa, in Azeitão.
In the last day, participants were received at Ceia Palace, the headquarters of the University, in which are the rectory and the multimedia area. There, participants were very pleased to share a brief testimony in video about their experience at Universidade Aberta of Portugal.
