The past two Covid-19 years created huge challenges for most Children’s University programs, and unfortunately some of the projects have been even stopped – as eucu.net president Jolanta Różowska reported at least for the situation in Poland at our last eucu.net online member-meeting on the 13th December. Nonetheless the pandemic might also trigger some positive side-effects. Similar to many other sectors, the online collaboration across countries and language barriers seem to become less of an obstacle as it used to be. Related to the general shift of activities and emergency programs a lot of good quality and innovative online content was also originated and revised by Children’s Universities in the last two years. As a consequence requests of a joint promotion under the framework of eucu.net or even joint usage of material provided or created by Children’s University programs was discussed in the previous months within the network. During the last eucu.net online member-meeting in December this ideas have been explored more thoroughly in small working groups. Currently there are no concrete results and actions coming from this considerations as there is still a lot to decide and to take into consideration – e.g. questions of intellectual property rights, or how to deal with languages. Still there is already now a huge willingness to extend the cooperation within the network into a direction of utilizing the available resources in a more open and accessible way. As part of the preparation for the meeting and to continue the data analysis we therefore set up a survey to clarify the interest of our members and of other related projects, to map what would be available to share or to promote in a joint manner. This online-questionnaire will be open for the next weeks to establish a good foundation for the further planning of eucu.net offers in this direction.
All members and interested parties are invited to fill-in the form, which is available at our website.
Besides the online-content subject, we also tried to get a snapshot on the current mood amongst the up to 35 participating Children’s University organizers at the meeting. Together we established a word cloud with comments to the past one or two years and another one related to the expectations for the coming year.
All in all it was good to see, that the morale of the organizing staff is still good and there is even some excitement regarding the future developments noticeable.
As a network we will try to bolster this positive sentiments and search for ways how to support each other in the coming endeavors.
Finally we also asked the participants to rate some statements concerning the developments of Children’s Universities in the future in general.