What is the ENLIGHT Competence Framework?

In the coming decades, certain societal challenges will transform the labour market, education and our everyday lives. These challenges cut across topics related to health, digital revolution, climate change, energy and circular economy, and equity. We have framed these challenges as part of our ENLIGHT flagship domains. Therefore, in all ENLIGHT courses and programmes, students engage with topics within these flagship domains. At the core of these educational initiatives is the intent to support students in developing certain competences.

The following figure depicts the competence framework that forms the base of all educational initiatives within ENLIGHT. The heart of the figure represents real-world 21^st century challenges that need our urgent attention. Moving outwards, these challenges can be categorized further into themes such as equity, health, energy, digitalisation and climate change as visualised in the second circle. To counter these challenges, the next outward circle depicts our educational response of implementing approaches such as transdisciplinarity, collaboration, research oriented education, intercultural and international learning, versatility and challenge-based education. The last circle represents the generic competences that students develop as a result of implementing these educational initiatives (adapted from OECD’s 21st century skills) [hover over the figure to read detailed explanations on each of these competences.] 

This comptence framework is operationalized in different ENLIGHT learning formats.The figure below outlines five such formats:

Please note that we distinguish specific ENLIGHT courses and programmes (1) from the courses shared among ENLIGHT universities (2):

1. ENLIGHT learning formats are designed collaboratively by partner universities, they correspond to the criteria described in the table below, use teaching and learning methods and develop students’ generic competencies described in the interactive figure above. ENLIGHT courses will be listed as ENLIGHT Joint Courses in the ENLIGHT course catalogue.
2. In addition, all ENLIGHT universities are welcome to widen their reach to students in the network by listing their existing courses on the joint online course catalogue.

Each of these offerings can take physical, virtual or blended form. These will be open for registration for students of all ENLIGHT partner universities. For a course to take place, it is not necessary for students of all universities to participate (e.g. if there are no applications from some university or if the number of students that can be accepted is limited). The following table outlines the criteria for designing ENLIGHT learning formats.

We encourage professors and course designers to use the competence framework while creating new ENLIGHT courses and programmes, but also to be inspired while designing and improving their existing courses. ENLIGHT universities are guaranteeing the quality of their education offer by means of a performant quality assurance system. All quality assurance systems are compliant with the European Standards and Guidelines and are inspired by the ESG’s underlying principles and concepts.