Best Practice Guide for Designing and Delivering EPICUR courses
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EPIC Missions
EPIC Missions
Why EPIC Missions?
EPIC Missions are group projects in which students from across Europe come together to solve real-world problems for real-world stakeholders with the academic support of their mission guides.
The EPIC Missions start with a pre-kick off phase, running over two weeks prior to the in-person kick-off. During the pre-kick-off phase students can familiarise themselves with the online course room and work on the preparatory tasks and (if applicable) on the readings provided by their stakeholders. The main part of the EPIC Missions then starts with an in-person kick-off event, running over 4.5 days. Here, participants meet their fellow team members, their academic mission guides and the external stakeholders (stakeholders can participate online in a 2-hour session). Afterwards, participants meet their team online to work on their stakeholder's challenge as a group with the support of their mission guides. The final group deliverable is due in January the next year and is based on the stakeholder's needs and the student's ideas. Most often, it consists of a written report with a problem analysis and recommendations for the stakeholder as well as an oral presentation with the opportunity for questions and answers. It can be supplemented, e.g., by creating a website or a video. During the mission period, students participate in other learning activities (e.g., university courses) related to the theme of the mission to arrive at informed recommendations for the stakeholders.
EPIC Mission Learning Outcomes
- actively engage in finding profound solutions to real-world problems
- collaborate in interdisciplinary, virtual teams, including collaborating with actors from different fields of practice across cultures and borders
- identify and apply appropriate research methods connected to the topic of their respective mission
- apply project management and design thinking skills in ambiguous and complex projects
- successfully communicate and present relevant information
- demonstrate understanding of theories, concepts and methods relevant to solving a given problem in the field of their respective mission
5 key points about EPIC Missions
- To make the learning experience in the EPIC Missions relevant and to contribute to resolving actual societal issues, EPIC Missions are centred around challenges provided by external stakeholders. Potential external stakeholders include the public (e.g., local or regional authorities, research bodies, cultural institutions, non-governmental organisations) and the private sector (e.g., companies, entrepreneurship initiatives). External stakeholders can benefit from participating in the EPIC Mission since they will receive a unique perspective on a relevant issue from a highly diverse group of motivated students from various countries and disciplines.
- Depending on the stakeholder, these challenges can have a local scale, expand to the wider region, nation-wide, or even across borders.
- By nature, these challenges have an interdisciplinary scope. In EPICUR the EPIC Mission are based in EPICUR’s priority areas Sustainable Transformation, European Values, Global Health, and Future intelligence.
- Students experience real world teamwork challenges and solve problems while having access to their Mission Guide. Mission Guides are instructors or past EPIC Mission participants, which are involved as support for the teams throughout the EPIC Mission. They help students to navigate stakeholder expectations and challenges along the way by offering regular check-ins and advice based on students’ needs.
- The teamwork to solve the challenge starts with the in-person kick-off event. Here, the students need to set the foundation for further work on their challenges when everyone has been heading back to their home university. Keeping up the motivation during this virtual, collaborative phase is difficult, but very rewarding when achieved.
EPIC Missions in practice
Examples of previous EPIC Missions and Stakeholders:
In our EPICUR Missions starting in the year 2022, the in-person kick-off took place in Vienna from 22-26 August 2022. The students needed to “solve” their missions by the End of January 2023. The outcome – how they want to record the results is flexible. There needs to be a short, written report summarising the results and a presentation where the stakeholders will participate, and the mission guides and the other teams are invited (online). The layout of the detailed results is flexible: it could be a longer report, a video, a website or anything the students’ creativity comes up with.
The External Stakeholders and Challenges in the EPIC Mission 2022/23 were:
- European Consortium of Liberal Arts and Sciences (ECOLAS): A 21st Century Education for Europeans
- Social City Wien (Austria): Education and communication measures for climate, nature, and sustainability
- La Nef des Sciences, Mulhouse (France): Energy transition and citizenship: reinventing the link between energy and way of life
- Solare Zukunft e.V., Freiburg (Germany): House of Sustainability
- Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe (Germany): Tackling today’s challenges together: How can museums foster debate and collaboration?
- City of Thessaloniki (Greece): Transformation of an urban stream section
More concretely as an example: the Mission by La Nef des Sciences:
About the stakeholder
La Nef des Sciences is a Mulhousian non-profit organisation that disseminates and promotes the co-construction of knowledge for a shared scientific, technical and industrial culture. The Nef des sciences is also:
- A team committed to making science accessible to everyone.
- A place of 280 m2 in the heart of the University of Haute-Alsace (Campus de l'Illberg) for a scientific culture in connection with research.
- Exhibitions, animations, events, cross-disciplinary educational tools.
As a Science Center, the Nef’s aims include:
- the dissemination of knowledge and scientific knowledge by means of our vulgarisation activities (animations, conferences, exhibition, etc.)
- the questioning of research within society through our scientific mediation actions (discussion games, debates, citizen projects, science cafés, etc.)
- support for professionals thanks to our commitment to the coordination of scientific cultural projects, the training of cultural actors, the orientation of young people or the animation of networks.
About the challenge
In June 2020, the last nuclear reactor of the nuclear power plant of Fessenheim was definitively shut down. This event marked the beginning of an important transition for this cross-border territory. More than just an energy transition, it is an opportunity to redesign the area into a sustainable territory that will impact the whole socio-ecosystem. To shape this mutation, a Project of the Future (Plan d'avenir du Territoire de Fessenheim or PATF) was signed in February 2019. The objective of the PATF is to become a role model in the reduction of the ecological and spatial footprint but also a European reference for decarbonisation.
The PATF brings European universities to collaborate (Eucor and EPICUR network) around transition issues and its socio-economic impacts as well as challenges connected to the technical recycling for the decommissioning of nuclear plants. This transition cannot happen without the citizens’ supports as it implies radical changes which will redesign our lifestyles and the link between energy and citizenship. In the light of Smart Grids, the transition becomes an immersive technological experience around energy efficiency and its restrained use; it turns the passive consumer into an information producer – a “prosumer” – who becomes part of a network of stakeholders. This new citizenship requires to go further than mere technological deployability by questioning the legitimacy of the change, the perception and social reception of this transition. In other words, this transition triggers the need for discussions, exchanges, and mediation in order to reinvent some uses. This project carries with it the issue of the citizen engagement into this environmental transition and the ability to imagine what the transition has to offer in terms of opportunities and what the individual can do with it.
How can we reach out to people, who rarely deal with this kind of issues in their everyday life? Which kind of education or communication measures can be chosen to not only inform them about these future relevant topics, but to involve them in solving the problems ahead?
Links to resources for EPIC Missions
An article on the first runs of the EPICUR Missions:
https://epicur.edu.eu/news/epic-missions-a-modern-engaging-and-pertinent-curriculum-for-epicur-students/
An article on the EPIC Missions 2022-2023:
https://epicur.edu.eu/student-voices/going-on-a-mission-25-epicur-students-kicking-off-the-epic-mission-2022-23-in-vienna/
If you are interested in the concept of the EPIC Mission but you are looking for a lower-threshold edition for your students, ask us (epicur@ucf.uni-freiburg.de) about the EPIC Sprint Missions – the condensed version of the EPIC Missions (one month instead of six month) and with only optional stakeholder input.
Interactive Approaches
Author(s)
This resource sheet has been co-written or written by
- Stefanie Klose (UFR)
- Aljoscha Kroy (UFR)
Related Resource Sheets
Next steps
If you need further support with developing your course, please contact your local teaching support unit.
If you need further information on offering your course for EPICUR, please contact your EPICUR institutional coordinator.
Local teaching support units
EPICUR Institutional Coordinators
Adam Mickiewicz University
Karolina Choczaj
karmench@amu.edu.pl
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Nikos Kouloussis
nikoul@agro.auth.gr
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Michael Zacherle
zacherle@kit.edu
University of Amsterdam
Tiffany Boersma
t.a.boersma@uva.nl
Universität Freiburg
Charlotte Langowski
charlotte.langowski@zv.uni-freiburg.de
Université de Haute-Alsace
Léa Ziri
lea.ziri@uha.fr
Universität für Bodenkultur Wien
Nicolas Fries
nicolas.fries@boku.ac.at
University of Southern Denmark
Ida Thøstesen
ilt@sdu.dk
University of Strasbourg
Pascale Nachez
pnachez@unistra.fr
Further use as OER explicitly permitted:
This Resource Sheet within the Best Practice Guide for Designing and Delivering EPICUR Courses was created by Stefanie Klose and Aljoscha Kroy, University of Freiburg.
Please attribute according to TASLL rule as follows: EPIC Missions (Best Practice Guide for Designing and Delivering EPICUR Courses), by Stefanie Klose and Aljoscha Kroy, University of Freiburg. Any icons included are protected by copyright, © The Noun Project, used with permission.
License: This work and its contents are – unless otherwise stated – licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .
Last edited: 12. Jan 2026, 17:01, Hutz-Nierhoff, Dorthe [dh1076@rz.uni-freiburg.de]