OLYMPIA

War has made normal university life impossible for many students in Ukraine and Palestine. About one in five higher education institutions in Ukraine has been damaged or destroyed, and all 12 higher education institutions in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed since October 2023. Close to 90.000 students in Gaza have lost at least one full academic year. Power cuts, closures and displacement break up students' learning and often leave them without recognised proof of what they can do. Support services often depend on the goodwill of individual staff members, so students with fewer opportunities are the first to fall through the gaps.

OLYMPIA, Skills for Life framework and resilience structures for war-affected higher education in Ukraine and Palestine, responds with small, lasting structures that keep students learning, recognised and supported when campuses close. Its motto sums up the approach: Skills for Life. Pathways to Resilience.

Running for 24 months and coordinated by the Central Ukrainian National Technical University, OLYMPIA helps four universities in Ukraine and Palestine offer recognised Skills for Life learning and clear, permanent support for students affected by war. Its general objective is to keep higher education inclusive, recognisable and credible under disruption, with priority for students with fewer opportunities.

The project's specific objectives are to:

• Build a shared Skills for Life competence framework and a micro-credential pathway of 20 to 30 ECTS, made of stackable 5 ECTS modules that are recognised across partner universities.
• Set up a Skills and Resilience Unit and a One-Stop Education and Support Desk at each partner university in Ukraine and Palestine, with trained peer mentors.
• Develop and validate at least four low-bandwidth, trauma-informed modules, publish them as open educational resources and train teaching staff to deliver them.
• Run two pilot cycles that reach at least 120 students, half of them students with fewer opportunities, together with student community projects.
• Embed the results in partner universities and package them so that other universities can adopt them.

VERDE leads Work Package 5 (Dissemination, Exploitation and Sustainability) and is responsible for the project website, the open webinars and the ethics and safeguarding framework. VERDE also leads the co-design of the competence framework, the inclusion criteria and the teacher training curriculum.

By the end of the project, OLYMPIA will have delivered:

• A Skills for Life competence framework and micro-credential model
• At least four open modules
• One-Stop Desks operating in four universities
• Training for at least 25 teachers
• Support for at least 150 students
• At least 15 student community projects
• A Skills for Life Package and a policy and practice brief for universities that want to adopt the model

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.