IBSEN zooms the May meeting – record number of participants

The IBSEN-Meeting, that was scheduled for May 2020 in The Hague, could not take place in person. This is regrettable for all IBSEN-Members, as IBSEN is enriched mainly by the face-to-face contact, that makes the network’s cooperation so successful. Despite this unfortunate situation the new presidents Alessandro Spano (Cagliari) and Armand van Oostrom (The Hague) made the best out of it and organised a Zoom-Meeting. Changig Jo from South Korea was responsible for the Zoom-Meeting’s technical support. The Meeting extended over two days, in which an overall of 35 people attended. Never before have so many people from the network universities actively participated in an IBSEN meeting.

The first day was split into a general section (Opening Plenary Session) and a Workshop section (Group works). In the first section, the To Do’s from the last session in Izmir and the status and future development of IBSEN were discussed in a large group of people. Furthermore, it was determined that the next meeting is scheduled to take place in November at Indian River State College, IBSEN’s newest member, in Florida. The Hague University will host the meeting in 2021. For the subsequent workshops, the participants were assigned to the group, which they had previously registered for. In the following five workshops small groups discussed:

  1. IBSEN summer schools
  2. Innovation and Entrepreneurship
  3. New Technologies
  4. Legal status of IBSEN
  5. How IBSEN can help students from partner universities when hosting them

The results were then placed in a shared folder so that each member had access to the documents at all times.

The next day’s session included the presentation of the results from the workshops, each of which was presented by a workshop speaker. Finally, the results from the entire IBSEN meeting were summarized and the To Do’s for the next session in Florida were compiled. Hoping to finally see each other again in person in Florida, the members said goodbye to each other. Everyone agreed: It’s better to have seen one another digitally than not at all!!!

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