Objectives

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At the end of the EU-ZW project the Zimbabwe universities will have clearly demonstrated, in a measurable and scalable way, that it is possible to collaborate on educational material in the energy sector in a global perspective, to co-create and re-use material from other colleagues, improve the material, adapt it to local conditions and create an international collaboration in which students, teachers, societal actors commonly attack some of the local and global challenges humanity stands in front of. A special effort will also be made towards trans-national collaboration through a clear correspondence comparing local credits with the European ECTS, certification and double degrees of specific educational programs. These results respond clearly to many of the needs of the partners, with the below five being the most important ones:

Low level of funding for upgrading teaching and research facilities to international standards that will lead to international research collaborations to address common problems.

Shortage of human capital to address energy related development challenges such as access to clean energy by the rural community, renewable energy technology adoption, efficient energy utilization and production

Lack of Entrepreneurs in the energy sector; in particular on off-grid systems

Low technical and managerial capacity of energy provider/ sector institutions

Lack of adequate funds to initiate multidisciplinary, multi-site (National, international) research projects that are demand-driven and problem-solving to stimulate national development.

Aims

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The present project aims to contribute to both modernize higher education and mitigate climate effects from energy services. The methodology towards this is the following

Join forces with an existing global educational consortium for efficient collaboration, and co-creation, of educational material.

Ensure an efficient “train-the-trainers” concept towards the pedagogical approach of student-centred, flipped-classroom, challenge-driven entrepreneurial, digital and online education, and identify specific subject area teacher-teams with similar interest.

Update, and when needed create new, courses in the energy sector at the partner universities towards a student-centred entrepreneurial perspective. Share this learning material with the broader educational community for impact and scalability.

Training on remote, virtual and simulation laboratories in renewable energies

Reuse existing, global, learning material in the area for such updates, while developing what does not yet exist.

Modernisation and quality assessment of the curricula of existing programs and new programs in energy, to include circular transformation, energy efficiency, and sustainable development.

Create, local as well as global, academic/business/society collaborations in which students/teachers/industry commonly defines, and solves, challenges in line with the UN Sustainability Goals.

Development of a joint short-courses and expert courses targeting technical skills required by local industries and connect students with industry during the studies.

Elaborate a set of recommendations and “best practices”, aligned with the ECTS concept in Europe, on how to expand the impact of EU-ZW towards other universities in the country (and region).