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Overview of the programme

Mix & Match sessions on Wednesday 8 October at 11-13

The Mix & Match sessions aim to connect diverse participants to share ideas and collaborate around specific topics. The objective is to find new contacts and foster collaborations that support Unite!'s education, research, or innovation activities. 

The sessions take the form of either A: two hour workshop, B and C: one hour workshop or D: Learning Café . Please note that depending on your choice of sessions you might have time to attend two. The attachment below shows an overview of all sessions and below the attachment you can find detailed description of each session. 

A. Two hour workshops at 11-13

A1: Building collaborative Unite! courses: A teachers’ workshop
This 2-hour interactive training targets Unite! teachers and early-career academics who are interested in designing collaborative, international courses. The session provides an engaging introduction to the different course formats within Unite!, with a focus on blended and online formats. Participants will gain insights into the benefits of collaborative teaching — such as the opportunity for teachers to showcase their course or academic topic to a broader international student community, potentially attracting talented students for master’s theses or future PhD projects, enriched intercultural learning experiences, and access to diverse expertise and funding opportunities—as well as the challenges, including coordination across institutions, aligning academic calendars, and managing virtual collaboration. 

After this workshop the participants should be able to:

• Formulate an action plan for collaborative course development, including identifying required support, approvals, and next steps.
• Design a draft outline for a collaborative, intercultural course with innovative pedagogy.
• Use the Unite! Joint Education Online Toolkit as a resource when designing collaborative courses and building partnerships.

The main objective is to equip participants with practical tools, peer inspiration, and a clearer understanding of the collaborative course creation process within Unite!—enabling them to take first steps towards designing their own courses and knowing where to get support when challenges arise. The session also allows Unite! teachers to find partners for their collaborative teaching projects, with emphasis on Unite’s focus areas.

A2: Joint programmes meets MetaCampus: needs, possibilites & challenges
The workshop addresses joint programmes and MetaCampus experts as well as academics interested in developing joint programmes. It is essential that joint programmes experts and developers have a clear understanding of the requirements of a LMS and the possibilities that MetaCampus provides. It is equally important for MetaCampus experts to understand how joint programmes work. Together we will identify what is needed by developers, which challenges have to be faced in the implementation and which solutions could be provided by MetaCampus.

A3: Digital learning support at Aalto University
Discover Aalto University's Digital learning services for teachers! Join us for this workshop designed to introduce you 91����� University's portfolio of services tailored for teachers, with a special focus on digital learning solutions. Primarily targeting teaching support staff, but all pedagogically oriented participants are warmly welcome. 

What to Expect:

• Explore Aalto’s digital learning services offering
• Visit specialized learning spaces on campus
• Exchange ideas and benchmark best practices in pedagogical support

A4: Pathway to successful student exchange at Aalto University
The workshop is targeted to outgoing and incoming responsible persons, who administrate student exchanges. The purpose is to introduce how student exchange services (out&in) are organized at Aalto University and discuss best practices and learn from each other. Can we find the Holy Grail together for inspiring students to go for exchange?

B: One hour workshops at 11-12

B1: Privilege walk –  can you step forward. The workshop about accessibility and inclusion.
This is an interactive workshop designed to deepen our understanding of privilege, accessibility, and inclusion in academic spaces. This session will foster reflection on how the environment impacts individual experiences, shaping access to education and resources. Through guided exercises, participants will gain a deeper understanding of systemic barriers and advantages, empowering both staff and students to create a more inclusive environment for everyone at our universities. 

B2: Enhancing your education through the Multilingual and Intercultural Communication Competence (MICC) framework
Competence is defined as the behavioral expression of knowledge, skills, and attitudes. This workshop aims to explore the internationally lesser-known yet state-of-the-art Multilingual and Intercultural Communication Competence (MICC) framework, as a good example of applying a competence framework to higher education practice. Participants will assess how effectively they currently foster these competencies in students and identify strategies for enhancement through the MICC lens.​

By the end of the workshop, participants will:

• Be familiar with the MICC Framework, its components and its relevance to higher education.​
• Have self-assessed their teaching practices: Reflected on current teaching methodologies to evaluate how well they promote the development of crucial knowledge, skills, and attitudes associated with intercultural competence.​
• Have identified improvement strategies: Started thinking about actionable strategies to enhance the integration of MICC principles into their teaching practices, aiming for observable behavioral changes in students.​

Expected Outcomes: Participants will leave the workshop with a clear understanding of the MICC framework and how it can help them enhance their teaching practices, leading to measurable behavioral changes in students’ intercultural and global competence.​

B3: Unite! internships
The objective is to gather different actors who could contribute to de deployment of a portfolio of Unite! internships with laboratories and industry.

C: One hour workshops at 12-13

C1: Co-creating interactive teaching tools for engineering education
This 1-hour Mix & Match workshop is designed to bring together university educators and students to co-create innovative, gamified teaching tools for engineering education, focusing on Fluid Power Systems course, but also adaptable across other engineering fields.

We’ll start with a short demo of interactive materials already developed in the Unite! “Developing Fluid Power and Systems in Higher Education” project, including card games, symbol-matching puzzles, lab videos and simulations, that help explain complex engineering principles in an engaging way. Participants will then form small, diverse teams (mixing students and teachers) to brainstorm and prototype a new teaching game or activity based on their own subject area or teaching challenge.

The objective is to:

• Foster collaboration between participants from different backgrounds and institutions
• Exchange ideas on active learning and gamification in higher education
• Prototype a mini teaching tool or classroom activity together
• Seed future collaboration opportunities within the Unite! network for teaching innovation.

No prior experience or skills with game design, fluid power or fluid mechanics are required, just curiosity and a willingness to experiment. By the end of the session, participants will have formed new connections, shared pedagogical approaches, and created a tangible idea to take back to their own classrooms or develop further with others in the Unite! community.

C2: Positive, resilient and supportive - how to stay optimistic in your next meetings
Would you like to be more resilient, have more clarity, be able to connect better and, if necessary, set boundaries, use coping strategies, and let less get to you? In this workshop, we support all Uniters who want to make a positive difference in their next meetings and take a positive path forward. Positive thinking about the future means feeling strong and being able to handle resistance or dissonance well. 

D: Learning Café with three sessions at 11, 11.45 and 12.30

Two Learning Café tables with their own specific topic will host three identical 30-minute sessions. 

Session times: 11:00 – 11:30, 11:45 – 12:15, 12:30 – 13:00

Table 1 Quality Management: Get better with PDCA!
The Plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle is a four-step model for carrying out improvements, widely used in quality management. By incorporating PDCA into your activities, your team or working group can effectively identify and address problems, optimize processes, and improve performance while contributing to Unite! quality culture. We will explain PDCA with simple examples and let you try it out. By the end of the session, you will know what PDCA is and how to use it to improve your work in Unite! and beyond.

Table 2 Inclusive Assessment
Interactive workshop to improve evaluation practices for all students, especially those with specific needs (ADHD, Autism Spectrum, Invisible disabilities etc). Small group discussions to develop guidelines for Unite! 
For Whom: Higher education faculty/staff, interested students. 
Benefits: Participants gain tools; students with needs get fairer assessments; broader community benefits from guidelines.
 

Aalto Labs on Wednesday 8 October at 14.30-16

Aalto hosts several high-level infrastructures for research, education and innovation, including unique nationally significant facilities. We invite you to hear an overview of the facilities we are very proud of, including short presentations on Metsähovi Radio Observatory, and Science-IT research infrastructure and Research Software Engineers. After the talks, there are guided tours to some of our research infrastructures on campus. 

Please sign up for a tour when registering for the Dialogue. 

Talk: Aalto Labs at 14.30-15

Visit: Aalto Labs at 15-16

Social activities

Please find the programme for the social activities and clubs on this page. 

Contact 

Do you have questions? You can contact the organisers via email unite.dialogue@aalto.fi .