The European Cross-Border University is built on a joint governance structure with sustainability at its heart. It focuses on the integration of resources and expertise, promotes democratic participation and decision making, foresees the needs of future management across a multitude of projects, and at the same time operates independently of project funds and project structures. Through its effective decision-making mechanisms and knowledge management structures across projects and initiatives, the European Cross-Border University is able to make important contributions to strengthening the impact of cross-border regions in Europe.

The General Assembly is at the very core of Across governance. As a democratically elected body, it guides the strategic directions of the European Cross-Border University and—through enabling hybrid participation, on-site or online, by all 110.000 members of Across—promotes a joint, European identity. Many of these bodies are already active on a provisional basis, such as the Executive Committee, the Rector’s Board, the International Student Council, a number of Ad-hoc Working Groups, and a Project Steering Committee from a joint project.

The European Cross-Border University is a digital first organization. We strongly believe that sustainability at a European Scale can only be achieved through powerful, user-centred, and innovative tools build upon state-of-the-art technologies. Due to the lack of a physical meeting place representing the
European University, an E-Campus will be developed with seamlessly integrated components for communication, learning, knowledge representation and sharing, and business engagement. The underlying technology will be based on a knowledge graph, an artificial intelligence technology allowing to represent and process arbitrary knowledge structures with application throughout the ECampus.

The E-Campus will even feature the digital Cross-Border-Engagement Centre—a Third-Place to meet after hours and to digitally attend events, such as the General Assembly together. As an alliance, we are committed to employing Open Source solutions and to providing our own solutions under an open source licencing model. The E-Campus will quickly become the digital heart of the European Cross-Border University

The European Cross-Border University aims to profoundly strengthen students and staff mobility. For this, it will develop new joint cross-border knowledge curricula, European by design, and built on the joint expertise of the Across members while taking into account the individual needs of all stakeholders in co-creation process with students, business partners, and local authorities. At the same time, several existing curricula at the member universities will be combined into multiple-degree programmes to further built on shared competencies (e.g. Artificial Intelligence, Engineering, Data Science). All degrees by all member universities will benefit from a sustainable digital course catalogue built on existing offers, highlighting and promoting different mobility formats (long or short term; physical, blended, or virtual) also contributing to inclusive education and internationalization at home.

As part of all curricula, the development of transversal skills, such as entrepreneurship and data literacy, will be promoted to enable students to become agents of change in cross-border contexts. Here, the European Cross-Border University will follow innovative pedagogical approaches by building a repository of socalled Atomic Learning Units (brief, thematically focused digital learning segments) that can be (re)arranged into digital learning offerings making use of gamification and offering micro-credentials.

Increasing the body of knowledge on cross-border challenges through excellent research firmly rooted in Open Science and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is a major field of activities for the European Cross-Border University. Interdisciplinary trans-national knowledge creation teams focusing on the defined key areas will bring together the expertise of all member universities and direct research activities in joint avenues. They collaborate with citizens, businesses, and local authorities to devise and test sustainable models of cross-border region development.

In this, the European Cross-Border University firmly trusts in the importance of structured joint PhD programmes. For this, a joint PhD School will be created with Cotutelle-based thesis supervision within the knowledge creation teams and course offerings focusing on trans-versal and entrepreneurial skills at its heart. It will enable PhD candidates to develop the necessary skills to later take effective leadership in the development of cross-border regions

The Internship Programme will enable students to find intern-ships in the vast businessnetwork in the cross-border regions of the European Cross-Border University. The business partners of the alliance will provide students with trained Mentors supporting them to develop practical experience and grow into active agents of change. The Life-long Learning and Internship Pro-grammes will be delivered by teaching and mentoring professionals who received dedicated “teach the teacher” courses to promote their didactic expertise, thereby enabling students to take away the best for their professional careers. The European Cross-Border University will act as a bridge between higher education and the professionals from businesses in cross-border regions through Life-Long Learning and Internship Programmes.

Building on the strong network of centres of knowledge transfer and life-long learning of the alliance, the joint life-long learning programmes of Across will be developed jointly by educators and business partners. They enable active professionals to draw upon the cross-border competencies of Across and promote their set of transversal skills. Life-long learning programmes will be built upon micro credentials following .