ATHENA: a Novel Higher Education Approach to Advance a Green Digital Europe

Sustainable education has many facets involving not only the conservation of our natural ecosystem, biodiversity and the development of a sustainable society but also promoting equity and ensuring life-long learning opportunities for all regardless of any handicaps or adverse circumstances. UNESCO, through its Sustainable Development Goals, and the European Commission through several programmes, push the society and the universities to promote Quality Education as a core asset in the digital era. ATHENA is a European University aimed at nurturing the development of all-inclusive green digitalization of societies. The educational model of ATHENA is based on several initiatives and novel pedagogies to advance green education and inclusion at the European Higher Education Area. At this paper we describe the general architecture of ATHENA focusing on concrete activities directly linked to sustainable education such as competence clusters, an embedded mobility culture and assistive technology. ATHENA will set all these in place in order to become by 2023 a renowned brand in higher education, a unified, yet distributed, campus underpinning a global value-chain for education and research services.