Goals

Promote a European Center for Excellence in the field of Project/Internship initiatives

To become that European Center for Excellence, PRAXIS shall leverage the common interests and promote cooperation among stakeholders, mainly Higher Education Institutions (HEI), students and employers. The European Centre for PI Excellence will create an environment to discuss and to promote innovation in the Project/Internship field, to join efforts and to exploit synergies and results among stakeholders.
 

Set a European market of Project/Internships

To achieve our goals we have devised a set of strategic priorities:

• Get a comprehensive knowledge on the state of the art of Project/Internship course units throughout Europe and its positioning worldwide.
• Specify a set of criteria, eventually an ontology, to map the field and to categorize any Project/Internship initiative; as a corollary we will organize existing initiatives under these criteria to load the taxonomy/ontology with the current state of the art and identify opportunities for innovation.
• Define a general model for Project/Internship courses that allows mapping and comparing distinct approaches unambiguously.
• Define a quality evaluation procedure for Project/Internship course units and establish a method to identify the main benefits to students assured by a specific project course unit given its characteristics.
• Identify the most appropriate formats for Projects/Internships courses that might satisfy employers’ needs in a given study area or scientific field and a given region.
• Design and create a consortium to offer several distinct types of Project/Internship courses at European level such as projects to be developed by international teams of students from distinct higher education institutions (MUTW) or individual internships in industry or research labs, multidisciplinary projects and other.
• Compile a resource of materials of relevance for the key actors (teaching materials for students and technical materials for teachers and other stakeholders).
• Identify base skills that might improve students’ experience and find effective ways of providing these skills to students.