In “The digital world in 2030: what place for Europe,” the European Internet Foundation: Political Leadership for Network Society, and the European e-Competence Framework, which is a component of the European Union’s strategy for the development of e-Skills in the 21st century, there is an explicit call to educators to address through their curricula the growing imperative for the development of e-skills. It is estimated that 90% of all jobs across different sectors will require some form of high tech skills. However, the “digital capability gap” in Europe has become “a problem of epic proportions because technology literacy, capability and skills are critical for all industries” (“e-Skills Manifesto,” 2012). The EU has set the development of digital skills as one of its seven top priorities (Digital Single Market, 2016). Even though college students use technology on a daily basis for social networking, gaming, and multiple other personal purposes, they are not given equal opportunities to use digital tools for learning, digital collaboration, and transnational exchanges across academic institutions and geographic locations (Arnold & Ducate, 2011). Further, models of traditionally delivered lectures are still promoted, restricted to the institutional boundaries and requirements. Consequently, curricula need to be redesigned to promote digital collaborations, e-skill development, immersive, and personalized learning that expand beyond the institutional boundaries. Students and instructors across Europe need to be exposed to the curricula of other academic institutions, identify common grounds for transnational collaborations, digital skills development, task-oriented activities, an collaborate with students and faculty members from other cultures and linguistic backgrounds.In this context, a pool of highly experienced educators, researchers, and professionals in technology enhanced lifelong learning in diverse disciplines will collaborate to redesign curricula around digitally participatory learning and transnational collaborations afforded by a digital platform and other Web 2.0 tools and applications. The aim of this consortium is first to design an interactive digital platform based on faculty members’ and students’ needs, and learning objectives. Second, to set a common agenda through redesigned curricula to promote collaborations, expand learning opportunities, community building, and guide students in using various digital tools to be immersed in multimodal learning experiences that cannot be experienced in any other context. The consortium members in each discipline (Electrical Engineering and ESL/EFL teacher education) will identify common grounds in the curricula, share lectures, design and integrate digitally-afforded collaborative learning activities that will promote transnational collaborations. Third, the project will draw on recent endeavors among educators to promote multimodal learning experiences to improve student engagement using multiple modes of context representation (i.e., interactive e-contexts) and cater to the learning styles of a diverse student population across Europe (Sankey, Birch, & Gardiner, 2010). It will expand this framework by including transnational collaborations in a new paradigm where institutions, faculty members, and students will be able to collaborate closely to experience more interactive, and collaborative learning experiences that expand beyond the institutional and geographic boundaries. The impact of these digitally-enabled collaborations will be determined by: (a) the development of, training on, and successful integration of the digital platform; (b) instructors’ evaluation of the platform; (c) instructors’ evaluation of the processes and products involved in transforming students’ learning; and (d) evaluation of students’ learning experiences, including their level of motivation, group decision making, team work, information exchange, and knowledge building. Various instruments will be used to evaluate both students learning processes and learning outcomes (Macdonald, 2003), as well as instructors’ experiences (e.g., instructor and student questionnaires). The project will generate insightful findings on the impact of such multimodal collaborative learning experiences and redesigned curricula to promote digital collaborations and e-Skill development on: (a) the students’ learning and level of motivation; (b) instructors’ teaching practices and efforts to meet the student needs; (c) the benefits of transnational collaborations among academic institutions, students, and faculty; (d) students’ building of competencies, skills, and knowledge. The impact of redesigned curricula and digitally-enabled collaborations among academic institutions will be used to identify opportunities to expand further this initiative in other areas and through the use of more extensive digital platforms and tools in various disciplines and transnational training activities.
The ReDesign project built on the need for the internationalization of curricula at HE institutions, with the aim to promote digital collaborations, digital competence, immersive, and personalised learning environments that bring students and instructors in a novel endeavor to transform learning that transcended beyond traditional conceptualizations of intercultural telecollaboration. Faculty and students at different departments at the UCY, UH and UPB were given the opportunity to view lectures across academic institutions, explore the material and techniques used in teaching in different contexts, engage in collaborative tasks, interact with AR scenarios and a newly designed LMS, ReDesign. This novel LMS enacted affordances to engage in multimodal learning experiences by featuring multiple features of social networks such as FB. It also provided several features that were oriented towards delivering lectures, such as “Lectures, Assignments." Intercultural exchanges and collaborative lectures, instructional material and activities were offered though these different newly created tools afforded by the ReDesign platform. Lectures could be accessed using QR codes and mobile devices – a feature that is not always available on other LMS. Students were given an opportunity to use a multiple tools and applications for learning, digital collaboration, and transnational exchanges. The main objectives of the ReDesign project were to: • Collaborate with IT professionals to create a collaborative platform, ReDesign, where instructors and students across academic institutions could collaborate, exchange instructional material, complete activities and tasks and engage in multimodal learning; • Identify specific common grounds in the curricula across HE to promote novel learning and teaching practices and facilitate collaboration across academic institutions in Europe; • Share expertise and exchange practices in designing collaborative activities and tasks based on various determining institutional factors and instructors’ and students’ teaching and learning needs; • Design immersive, multimodal learning experiences to promote intercultural exchanges and learning among students in different disciplines; • Use existing tools such as Dropbox to create collaborative activities and exchange expertise in using several tools and resources; • Improve the features and functionality of the newly created interactive platform, as suggested by the participating instructors, students and consortium members; • Compose a handbook related to the outputs, procedures and lessons learned from the project, such as the ReDesign platform, the task design, the need for internationalisation and digitalisation at academic institutions, and the outputs and future directions. These objectives were achieved through a close collaboration among the three participating academic institutions, UCY, UH and UPB and three experienced organizations. Professionals, instructors and researchers in Applied Linguistics, Engineering, IT, educational technology and CALL redesigned the curricula to provide students with immersive, multimodal and collaborative learning experiences. Consortium partners exchanged views, expertise, knowledge and developed material and technologies that contributed to the needs of the project. Throughout the duration of the project, multiple activities were implemented to realize the project’s IOs: (i) the development of a platform where multiple resources, lectures, tasks and activities were uploaded (ii) the close examination of the curricula and the identification of common grounds across the participating academic institutions; (iii) the design of tasks and activities that promoted intercultural telecollaboration and were related to the instructional material; (iv) the alignment of tasks and activities with the course goals and objectives (v) the design of three novel AR applications and their integration in the curricula (vi) the completion of a handbook to promote the pedagogical, intercultural and linguistic value of the activities The specific objectives of the ReDesign platform were: (i) To add educational content, such as lectures, assignments, and instructional material among the faculties (ii) To contribute to the internationalization of HE curricula (iii) To promote transnational, intercultural collaboration among instructors and students. (iv) To provide students with a multimodal learning experience in AR and QR codes. (v) To promote technological familiarity among students by featuring several features and tools similar to the ones found in social networking sites (e.g., FB). (vi) To extend students' immersive learning experiences (vii) To promote further telecollaborative initiatives among HE instructors. The ReDesign platform also offered multiple other tools which can be accessed using the following link: http://beta.redesign-project.eu/ Login credentials: [email protected] Password: 1234