On May 18th 2022, the “Community-Engaged University” conference organized by the SEA-EU alliance was held at the University of Split, which brought together a number of service-learning (SL) experts. The SEA-EU Alliance (https://sea-eu.org/alliance/) is made of six universities: University of Cádiz (Spain), Université de Bretagne Occidentale in Brest (France), University of Kiel (Germany), University of Gdańsk (Poland), University of Split (Croatia) and University of Malta (Malta).
The alliance is oriented towards the development of the third mission and the creation of a socially engaged university. Service learning has been identified as one of the tools which allow universities to listen to the community needs and respond to challenges through the implementation of social challenges in academic curricula. The conference had over 80 participants and 39 presentations from the following countries: Spain, Poland, France, Germany, Croatia, Malta, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Slovakia, the United Kingdom, Romania and Canada.
The team from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb has presented the eSL4EU project to inform the academic community about e-service learning in general and the possibility for each of them to share their e-SL experiences and e-SL best practices in EOSLHE website. Also, the purpose of the eSL4EU project was presented together with a short overview of the project results. The audience was also informed about the eSL4EU website and the announcement of the national pilot courses was made, since the national pilots of the e-course “e-Service Learning for more digital and inclusive EU Higher Education systems” will be held in 2023, which is an opportunity for academic teachers from Poland, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, Romania to participate in these on-site learning events.