CIVENHANCE Project

La Salle Campus Barcelona - Universitat Ramon Llull (URL) joins the project CIVENHANCE: e-Service Learning for boosting academic civic engagement in rural areas (co-funded by the European Union under grant 2024-1-SK01-KA220-HED-000245367). This project is coordinated by Univerzita Mateja Bela v Banskej Bystrici (Slovakia) and four other universities (in addition to Universitat Ramon Llull) participate: Sveuciliste U Zagrebu (Croatia), Libera Università Maria SS. Assunta di Roma (Italy), University of Balearic Islands (Spain), and Pädagogische Hochschule Wien (Austria).
 

The overarching goal of participating in this innovative Service Learning (SL) initiative is to leverage the potential of both rural and electronic service learning (e-SL) to foster sustainable community development and enhance higher education's social impact. In this project, we aim to respond to the needs of rural communities through partnerships between urban Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and rural areas overcoming classical barriers like accessibility, time constraints, and travel costs by means of the digital technologies that enable e-SL.

In this regard, URL will be leading the Work package 4 of the project: e-SL Matchmaking Platform. This work package aims to develop a web-based matchmaking platform in which (1) HEI teachers and/or organizations will upload available civic engagement activities, and (2) students and/or teachers will be able to select—following an artificial intelligence driven recommendation—the civil engagement activity that best fits their profile and interests. In this work package we will explore the latest advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and try to build an intelligent chatbot interface to interact with all the users of the platform.

The project started in October, 2024 and is scheduled to last 36 months.