EDUTECH

Within the strategic framework for European cooperation in education and training (“ET 2020”), the main objective of this project is to improve the quality and efficiency of learning outcomes, directly impacting the results of education and training. Specifically, it will focus on implementing new technologies that will enable greater experiential learning, improving the students’ employability, and reducing the skill gap with the labour market. Consequently, this will impact equity, social cohesion, while enhancing creativity and innovation, as the technologies implemented within this project will include among others augmented reality, gamification and online learning. This project creates a specific framework in order to develop the labour market skillset through detailed methodologies. Furthermore, considering equity, social cohesion and active citizenship as one of the main EU objectives, the proposed project directly impacts it by benefiting part of the adult population that has been evidenced to partake in higher education in a lesser proportion, mainly individuals with disabilities and females with unequal access to education. Because of this, the project has the potential to promoting stronger grounds for equal access to employment opportunities as it fosters digital environment knowledge acquisition. In addition, it will contribute to higher creativity and innovation, particularly entrepreneurship, across diverse population segments and education and training levels. The consortium is composed of four entities, all pertaining to the European Union: Universidad Europea de Madrid (Spain), who will be leading the project; Universitá degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Remilia (Italy); European University Cyprus (Cyprus); Stratesys (Spain). Each of these organizations has its own research group dedicated to innovation in education, particularly in areas related to the project. The professional trajectory of each of them supports their participation in the project, together with the parallel successful initiatives they have been carrying out, which can positively impact and create synergies with the proposed project. Specifically, the project’s outcomes will be: firstly, The Experience Teacher Suite, which consists of an online ICT platform with technological tools and educational content that can be distributed and implemented by other higher education institutions; secondly, a MOOC and user guide for professors wishing to implement this framework; thirdly, open source educational tools (games, contests, assignments for developing specific skillsets, knowledge pills, among others); fourth, an experiential learning platform which through artificial intelligence algorithms (Learning Analytics) will be able to evaluate learning patterns and strengthen the implementation of the framework.