In May 2021, the Skillman Alliance reiterated its collaboration with the DITES partner (Digital Technologies, Education and Society)”, through the signing of a new Memorandum of Understanding on the European ECOLHE project.
DITES is a public research center based in Italy, aimed at providing a space for research and experimentation within the “Link Campus University” in Rome. The space is dedicated to tackling topics related to education, lifelong learning, and guidance, as well as the use of new technologies in different learning contexts. All DITES activities are carried out for and with schools and all the necessary public and private, institutional, and collective actors interested in the centrality of education in all its declinations: education, training, work, accompaniment, edutainment, and active citizenship.
The ECOLHE Project is an action research initiative that aims at creating the best conditions for an exchange of best practices at the European level. The project is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union (Project Code: 2020-1-IT02-KA203-079176).
The main objective of ECOLHE is to understand how national policies have translated European policies, and how universities have translated regulatory constraints in practice, trying to pinpoint useful suggestions for policy-makers, decision-makers, and Academic Bodies and build an EHEA based on teachers’ professionalism and EQAS.
The integration of ICTs in teaching and learning processes is a challenge for educational institutions today. Online learning can be considered an important tool for the future of the EHEA. There are elements of criticality in the capabilities of these institutions to integrate the new opportunities offered by digital technologies. These are complex ongoing changes that require the rethinking of teaching paradigms, organization processes, management models, evaluation, relationship systems, and the competency framework for teaching.
The ECOLHE project aims at highlighting experiences, practices, and competencies of faculty, researchers, and university staff in the digital domain to foster the dissemination of best practices in training and competencies for online and blended learning in higher education. For this reason, participation in the skillman.eu network is a great opportunity to share and develop organizational learning processes.
The key action points are:
- provide decision-makers and institutions with useful data for the definition of new strategies;
- contribute to the European debate on the modernization of higher education in the digital era;
- promote a digital culture, through a multi-stakeholder approach that takes into account the systemic complexity introduced by ICT, which has involved and transformed social and organizational practices, learning contexts, and models;
- develop a new approach for an innovative vision of European e-learning in higher education, through the production of an innovative perspective more attentive to the qualitative dimension of teaching in line with the key competencies of teaching in the digital age;
- create networks of cooperation and partnership between different educational institutions (universities, research centers, training institutions, digital publishers, and developers);
- offer a replicable research-intervention model in the area of experimental educational research.
A video presentation of the project is also available here.
For further information, please contact Stefania Capogna – ECOLHE project Scientific Director.