The DualEdu Erasmus+ project, aimed at the implementation of dual education in higher education in Serbia, has been recently presented at the first kick-off meeting of the project team at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. The project brings together 14 permanent partners from Serbia, Germany, Austria, France, Spain and Poland. It started on 15th October 2017 and is scheduled to last over the next three years.
The basic idea is to make a dual education model in the system of higher education that would be general enough, but also flexible, and which could be implemented depending on the needs of higher education institutions, says professor Nenad Zrnić, Vice-Dean for international scientific cooperation at the FME. The development of the expert system is due to start in the first year of the project, and, based on the input and output parameters, this system should make it possible to define the needs and the preferred outcome of dual education, he says. This stage should be followed by the pilot project that would be implemented in several study programmes, i.e. by several institutions, which should enable an insight into the functioning of dual education in practice.
Besides the University of Belgrade, i.e. the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering which manages the whole project and work package, project participants include the Metropolitan University, University of Kragujevac, University of Novi Sad and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Applied Studies. The partners from France will manage the work package that includes the experiences in dual education of the EU member countries, while the Austrian project team will manage the work package for quality testing. The project also features 13 associate members/companies, which would make it possible for students to attend dual education. These companies would be the actual beneficiaries of project results in practice. At present, these are mostly IT companies, but it is expected that a number of other companies from the field of machine industry will be included, as well as other companies whose work encompasses the areas in which the mechanical engineering students, as well as the students of other faculties, are educated.
(Source: Faculty of Mechanical Engineering)