Brussels, 25/02/2011 (Agence Europe) - The Bologna Process calls for closer and more transparent cooperation among governments, high education establishments, students, teaching staff and quality assurance agencies. This however, is an objective that is difficult to achieve in reality and one which demands the active involvement of universities and students. The project MyUniversity saw the light of day on 1 October 2010. It is partly funded by the European Union's ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP), and 17 universities in Bulgaria, Lithuania, Spain, Slovakia and Sweden are taking part. The project seeks to design, deploy and validate an integrated solution for empowering and involving university members and stakeholders in transparent decision-making which will allow the development of appropriate recommendations and action plans for EU higher education - and thus help achieve the objectives of the Bologna Process.
The main target outcomes of the MyUniversity project, launched online this month, are: 1) to demonstrate how to use an array of specific e-participation tools (concentrated in a single platform) in several countries at the same time to allow people to participate in local- and European-level higher education issues; 2) to demonstrate how citizens of different countries can benefit from contents, results and best practice generated by other participants abroad, and how issues being debated in one country can initiate new discussion in other countries, or even a cross-border discussion on European matters; 3) to demonstrate how easy it is for decision makers to include e-participation initiatives as a new factor in their decision-making processes - the idea is not to substitute the decision-making process and take it out of the hands of elected representatives, but to offer them mechanisms to be able to take account of participants' opinions. (I.L./transl.rt)