Month: July 2020

Peter Lennie discusses the importance of collaborative networks at the Sustainable Development Solutions Network ‘University Sector Support to UN Secretary-General’s Call for a Decade of Action on the SDGs: A Meeting of Presidents of Universities’. to an audience of university and United Nations leaders.

In the second of the WUN webinars on challenges universities are facing during the COVID-19 pandemic, teaching and learning experts shared their experiences and techniques for helping students stay engaged with their courses during online delivery.  Every university in the Network has been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and has had to adapt at pace. However, these common challenges have taken diverse forms and prompted distinctive solutions, with each university responding to a specific and locally grounded set of dynamics.  

Click through for a summary of the discussion and to watch a video of the webinar in its entirety.

WUN is pleased to announce the results of its 2020 special initiative to address research needs triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Eight awards were made to support time-sensitive research projects whose value depends on being able to collect or analyse data obtained during the pandemic, and on which the collaboration of WUN partners confers real advantage. Awarded project teams are comprised of researchers from across 19 WUN member universities.  

Peter Lennie, Executive Director of WUN, said “We had an overwhelming response to this special call, and received many strong and exciting proposals. The eight successful projects take special advantage of member universities’ cultural and geographical diversity in tackling urgent and important problems that have arisen from the pandemic.”

Click through to learn more about the awarded projects.

WUN is hosting a series of webinars to help member universities benefit from each other’s experience in addressing some of the unprecedented pandemic-related challenges facing them.  The next in our series, to be held on Thursday 23 July will discuss the challenge of maintaining student engagement and attention during remote course delivery.

Universities around the network have deployed various approaches, reflecting the different geographical and cultural contexts in which they work, to help keep students engaged as classes have shifted from the classroom to computer screen.  In this webinar we will explore what successful strategies have emerged, what we’ve learned from failures, and how the diversity of experiences from around the network can help inform each of us as we continue to teach remotely.

Click through to learn more and register for the webinar.