Name of the Project: ACADIGIA - Accelerating aCAdemia's DIGItal readiness for online and blended Augmented teaching

Project Number: 2020-1-PT01-KA226-HE-095042

Project Coordinator: Instituto Politécnico do Porto (Portugal)

Type of Project: Erasmus+ KA 226 Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness

Project Lifetime: 1st of March 2021 until 31st of August 2023

Partners:

Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (Spain)

Universita Politecnica delle Marche (Italy)

NTUA (Greece)

Inova+ (Portugal)

Universitatea Politehnica Timisoara (Romania)

Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)

Aims and Objectives:

The ACADIGIA project is a 24-month initiative to be implemented in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Romania, and Ireland, aiming to accelerate the digital readiness of Polytechnic higher education institutions towards the sustainable adoption of more online and blended approaches in education.

Overall Objective:

The ACADIGIA project was conceptualised within the joint interest of the institutions involved to develop an acceleration model for enabling Polytechnics to embrace the digital transformation of education and is founded mainly upon the 1st strategic priority of the DIGITAL EDUCATION ACTION PLAN - fostering the development of a high performing digital education ecosystem.

Specific Objectives:

It is shaped to provide solutions to the overarching problems that were highlighted in a dedicated needs analysis that was performed in the partnering Polytechnics, and summarises the following:

• Distance learning implemented because of C19 showed that presential classes were transported virtual classes, with videoconference tools, without using e-learning methodologies.

• Teachers started to use LMS (Learning Management Systems) like Moodle or Blackboard to support their classes. However, they don't just use them to disseminate or receive documents by and from students.

• Pedagogical skills for distance learning, followed by technical skills are the main skills identified as needed to implement distance learning and using virtual environments.

• Teachers reported difficulties in transforming their materials of presential classes to distance learning. They used the same materials and type of classes, but knowing that it is not the most proper way to do it.

• Assessment was the most difficult issue to handle in distance learning. Implementing distance assessment is very challenging because there is a lack of trust in online systems. This difficulty mainly shows that teachers need training on e-learning strategies to be able to implement with efficiency online assessment strategies. This issue demonstrates the need for training and preparation for the overall implementation of distance learning.

According to the context above, the project will generate a viable solution to accelerate the digital readiness of Polytechnic HEIs, and focus not only on providing tools and resources for supporting this, but also on testing an innovative mentoring scheme that will generate intra-institutional teams of educational practitioners dedicated to reinventing their pedagogies and implementing more online and blended approaches. This will allow to confidently tailor a dedicated fail-proof acceleration model and policy lines for the HEIs to make the methods reproducible, and add this last piece in the transnational scenery to complete the European puzzle of: #Frameworks of operation -> #Evaluation models -> and now the added “Acceleration model”.

Coordination of the project at ISCAP / Researchers involved: