The University of Bologna (with Una Europa) protagonist of the meeting on European Alliances between Italy and France

The University of Bologna was also present last 30 March in Turin at the event "Italian and French Universities in the European Universities initiative", promoted by the Italian-French University (an intergovernmental institution for academic and scientific cooperation between Italy and France) and the University of Turin, leader of the alliance UNITA - Universitas Montium.

The event brought together sixty Italian and French universities that are members of thirty different European Alliances in order to discuss and share concrete projects in terms of mobility, research, innovative teaching and student involvement.

The University of Bologna participated as a member of the Una Europa alliance together with its French partner, the Université Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne. They were also present the Vice Rector for International Relations, Raffaella Campaner, and the Rector’s Delegate for Una Europa, Silvia Bianconcini.

The steps taken by Una Europa in the design of innovative teaching programmes, such as the Bachelor of Arts in European Studies - BAES (the first European joint degree course), the joint PhD programme in Cultural Heritage, post-graduate vocational training programmes and MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses) on sustainability and artificial intelligence, were illustrated. New models for mobility, to be applied on a large scale to involve the entire Una Europa community, were also presented, as were the initiatives put in place by the universities of the alliance to raise students' awareness on Una Europa and engage them in a more stimulating and effective way at the local level were presented.

The event is part of the European Alliances initiative, launched by the European Commission in 2018 with the aim of strengthening cooperation between countries in the European higher education and research area. The initiative involves more than 340 institutions in 31 countries for a total of 44 alliances. Of these, as many as 24 involve at least one Italian and one French partner, for a total of more than 50 institutions: numbers that testify the strong participation of the two countries in the initiative.

The University of Bologna is one of the founding members of Una Europa. The alliance now counts 11 partners collaborating with the aim of creating a shared, multilingual and multidisciplinary academic space, with the ambitious goal of creating a true European University. Since February 2019, Una Europa has secured the support of the European Commission to kick-start Una.Futura, an ambitious four-year project promoted by the Erasmus+ Programme under the European Alliances, funded with EUR 14.4 million.