On 27 November 2023, ESC-tension 2 – Accelerating the ESC adoption in the EEA, the new Erasmus Plus project coordinated by Fondazione ENDISU, was kicked off at the ESN offices in Brussels. The project is financed under the KA2 Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices – Strategic Partnerships for HE.
ENDISU had already coordinated the ESC-tension project from 2020 to 2022. This second follow-up project, officially started on 1 November and will end on 30 April 2026, for an overall duration of 30 months.
The purpose of ESC-tension2 is to develop a series of materials which, starting from a complete analysis of the phases of “university life”, will aim to raise students’ awareness of the potential of ESC, providing them with training packages and operational tools that will guide and encourage them to use concrete of the ESC. The point of reference will always be the ESC-tension multiplatform, which will offer these tools in 4 languages, which will be added to those already created and intended for HEIs and SSPs. Through the development of these tools, ESC-tension 2 aims to encourage the adoption of ESC by European students, promoting interconnected higher education systems through a “bottom-up” approach, thus contributing to the increase of access, participation, mobility and completion rates in higher education.
Besides the hosting partner ESN and the consortium leader ENDISU, four more partners from four different European countries joined the meeting: ISIC (Denmark), the university of Aveiro (Portugal), the University of Normandie (France) and the European Campus Card Association (Ireland).
The kick-off meeting gave the partners the opportunity to go deep into the main relevant administrative, financial and organizational aspects of the project, which recently went through some relevant innovation, the impact and dissemination topics, as well as to have an overview of the all the Working Packages contents, the tasks and the next steps to take straight away to get the project actually started.