A world outside: Internationalisation is well underway at Health

Seventy odontology students in their seventh semester are gathered in the lecture theatre, and the big screen is ready. As part of a theme day on pain, a lecture is being streamed directly from Kentucky University. On the other side of the big screen, students from Kentucky were also supposed to have their notebooks ready – however, the challenges of collaboration across the Atlantic are the time difference, and this time it was not possible to arrange lecture times that could fit into the students’ schedule both here and over there. Nonetheless, the lecture is of great value to the students, says Associate Professor Eduardo Castrillon of the Department of Dentistry and Oral Health:

“We have a really good network of leading pain researchers, and by drawing upon this, we can give our students lectures from other angles. This strengthens their knowledge and approach to learning, and gives them a good sense of their level of knowledge compared with other universities around the world.”

Many notes are taken while Dr Isabel Moreno Hay explains how, simply by asking patients to explain where it hurts, we can obtain a good sense of whether the root of the problem is muscle pain or problems in the jaw. The lecture is full of small videos and animations showing how dentists can identify the source of pain – and that is precisely the goal of the lecture, says Eduardo Castrillon.

“We believe that a lecture like this can help the students to place their theoretical knowledge in a practical context, and thereby create a better understanding of the perhaps slightly heavy texts that they read. For that reason, we often hold a more practice-oriented lecture in the lead-up to an examination.”

And even though it was not possible this time to have the students in Kentucky join in, the section of Orofacial Pain and Jaw Function is already in the process of organising the next international educational collaboration.

Cultivating the Circle U. partnership

It is not only across the Atlantic that such international cooperation is flourishing. Since 2020, Aarhus University has been part of the Circle U. Alliance, in which seven European universities are collaborating on research and teaching. The project is now just past the halfway stage, and at the start of December, Health took stock of the collaboration at a seminar. The conclusion was clear: A lot of exciting projects already exist, but there are also ambitions and opportunities for even bigger and broader collaborations.

Pro-rector Berit Eika began by providing the current status, and said that the EU Commission is applying for an extension of the alliance, so that the cooperation can continue.

She also said that Circle U is a supplement to Health’s internationalisation strategy, with many more projects on the way: A conference on diversity in March, two summer schools for PhD students, and the upcoming MatchPoints conference on Global Health are among the projects that will draw upon the alliance.

The dream of a common Bachelor programme

One of the big Circle U. dreams has been for a joint Bachelor degree, where neuroscience has been involved. But even though there is a will, the way is not always clear. Amongst other things, the different languages across the seven universities present a challenge.

At the seminar, Professor Morten Storm Overgaard and Professor Leif Østergaard talked about some of the work that has so far been done to create joint teaching in neuroscience.

“It has to be an interdisciplinary degree programme in which research questions drive the work. And it must be easy to integrate, for example by dividing the teaching into modules, so that the students can easily travel between the universities and strengthen their research collaboration,” said Morten Storm Overgaard.

The idea is for teaching staff to present the students with some of the open research questions, so that, rather than just studying existing knowledge, they can actively work to seek out new knowledge in connection with the teaching.

The common study programme is to a large extent still just a project on the drawing board, but according to Morten Storm Overgaard, both the Humboldt University in Berlin and Pisa University have shown interest in the collaboration.

And although the first batch of joint Bachelor degree students may not be just around the corner, the work has great value in itself, explained Leif Østergaard:

“It’s really inspiring. We work together in the same way as though we were holding a symposium for peers: What haven’t we found out yet? How do we qualify the knowledge we have? The students study the textbook, and then they get to follow the various stages of investigation and are placed in contact with researchers who are working on these questions.”

‘Everyday internationalisation’

In addition to the dream of a common Bachelor programme, several other topics were discussed at the seminar, including the summer schools that the Circle U. collaboration has fostered at the seven universities, where both the challenges and the opportunities for development were discussed.

In addition, Lotte Skovborg, project manager for Mobility and Transnational Education, talked about the long-term ambitions.

The target is for 50% of the students from the seven universities to have some kind of international contact, and it  is hoped that the universities will adjust the formats for courses so that they can be shorter, virtual and hybrid. And internationalisation must also be incorporated into the courses, as was the case with the lecture from Kentucky: so-called ‘everyday internationalisation’.

2023 will be a busy year for Circle U. Many summer schools are being organised, the year’s MatchPoints conference, ‘Global Health Challenges and Solutions’, will be based on the collaboration, and visits to Humboldt in Berlin are also on the programme, while a group from the Department of Biomedicine will be going to King’s College in London to hear how they work with research-based degree programmes.

You can read more about the Circle U. partnership here: https://www.circle-u.eu

Contact

Associate Professor
Department of Dentistry and Oral Health
Eduado Castrillon
Mail: ec@dent.au.dk
Tlf: +4587152657