On the 22nd of January 2024 took place a Kick-off meeting for the just started new project “Virtual Projects for European Digital Natives (NomadTrail)” within the Erasmus+ KA2 Cooperation Partnerships in Higher Education programme.

The meeting was hosted by one of the partner organisations Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium and organised by Fachhochschule Dortmund (FH Dortmund) – the grant holder of the project.

During the project meeting the 12 representatives from the partner universities not only discussed the budget and future outcomes of the project but also directly held several workshops on the topics of the future deliverables of the NomadTrail: workshop on the Sustainable Business Innovations, on Digital Company Case Studies, on Innovation Projects and workshop on the Virtual Cross-Border Projects.

The kick-off meeting has enabled numerous and fruitful discussions on frameworks for virtual cross-border projects. Every participant could share their own experiences on teaching innovation project management methods, didactic tools and other best practices on teaching and education within virtual cross-border setup. Some of “hot” questions were: what exactly would fit master programmes at partner universities, which case studies to elaborate for their future “digital twins”, and what can/should be delivered online and onsite within virtual and cross-border learning setups. At the end of the meeting, it became clearer, what the project would strive for and that this field will be challenging but extremely interesting at the same time.

The project “Virtual Projects for European Digital Natives” started on 31.12.2023 and will last for the next 3 years with the budget of 400k EUR. The consortium of 5 European universities – FH Dortmund (as a grant holder), KU Leuven, the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) and Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) – will be working to achieve the goal of the project – to provide students in Master’s programmes in IT, engineering and business with the competences for successful work in innovative, agile cross-border projects which are conducted in digital collaboration environments. 

Students are the digital natives and they become digital nomads in their work life, working from anywhere at any time, making their career a nomad trail with respective required competences. NomadTrail will serve their needs by building a virtual, cross-country and cross-university community with 4 main outcomes:

• A Digital Framework for Virtual Cross-Border Projects
• An Innovation Projects Programme with 3 transdisciplinary students’ project formats with business
• A Train-the-Trainer programme for teachers
• The annual Summer School on Innovation Projects