After many months of intense preparations, the EPICUR European University Alliance launched its first language & culture pilot programmes on 12 February. The alliance is delighted to report that the take up of the course offerings by EPICUR students exceeded our expectations. This is illustrated by the fact that many students applied for participation in more than one course.
In total, we received over 250 registrations for the 3 pilot programmes in Modern Greek, Nordic and Slavonic languages. The first courses will start on 1 March and will be offered by 5 EPICUR partner universities in Amsterdam, Freiburg, Poznan, Thessaloniki and Strasbourg.
The EPICUR alliance’s original aim was to experiment with only one pilot course for each of the 3 language programmes, but due to the overwhelming interest and support from EPICUR lecturers and partners, this number increased almost tenfold. And this is only the start of something bigger and better, as the 3 EPICUR language and culture subgroups coordinated by the University of Amsterdam (EPICUR work package lead for Multilingualism) already embarked on preparing an expanded portfolio of course offerings for the next academic year.
First impressions of the application results show that students seem to be interested in both language acquisition and thematic academic courses. This spring semester, language acquisition courses are offered in Croatian, Finnish, Modern Greek and Polish languages. While the majority of the available courses will focus on thematic areas, such as literature, linguistics, history, politics, culture and cinema related to European languages and regions. All courses in this spring semester will be delivered online through the EPICUR Inter-university Campus, which is being tested during this pilot.If you are interested to receive more updates about future courses, please leave your contact details here. For other questions, please contact us by email: epicur_uva-bb@uva.nl
