ATHENA European University: a holistic approach to personalized learning

A transformation wave impacting higher education and research is crossing Europe since 2018, mainly due to the ambitious European Universities initiative by the European Commission but also somehow due to the Covid-19 pandemic that suddenly pushed academics for online teaching. The European Universities initiative combined with this abrupt change to the commonly established teaching modes is a unique window of opportunity to transform higher education. The ATHENA European University is one of the 44 alliances integrated in the European Universities initiative by the European Commission that is developing novel education approaches contributing to the green digitalization of inclusive societies. In this paper we provide an overview of the ATHENA Joint Education Model and discuss two of its core components, Competence Clusters and Embedded Mobility, under which we provide details about two approaches exploiting embedded mobility that are currently running with very promising results.