The objective the the ColLab project is to provide teachers/professors in Higher Education with an educational resource centre and a space where they can exchange knowledge and experiences and instructional technologies with their peers in various European countries, in order to become better prepared to face the evolving teaching and learning environment in that sector. The ColLab project is being prepared at a time in the evolution of higher education in Europe when a fresh focus on the approach to teaching, in and around the classroom is called for at a political level (Paris Communiqué 2018) and at the level of practical implementation in Higher education institutions. CoLab proposes to produce several results, including a report entitled "Framework of teaching and learning innovations: a sample of European universities", which will provide the starting context for the project in terms of the state of the art of teaching and learning innovation at the 5 partner universities in particular and a sample of good practices from other sources around the world. It develops also a Needs Analysis, collecting qualitative information addressing the perceived needs of University teachers/professors in terms of the kinds of services and tools that they would like to have available to them in the educational resource centre. The centerpiece of the project will be a web-based platform hosting a suite of innovative teaching resources that will be uploaded by an open-ended community of users and updated continuously, providing also information on, and access to training programmes held at the partner universities, as well as a collaboration space for exchanging opinions and ideas between professors / teachers in higher education from different countries. The ColLab Platform will be officially launched at the end of 2021 in Germany, with an inspirational dissemination event attracting hundreds of teaching staff from higher educations to reflect on innovation in teaching and learning to have a taste of what ColLab might offer them. ColLab is an ERASMUS+ Strategic Partnership project coordinated by the Universidade de Aveiro (Portugal) with the partnership of Università degli studi di Trento (Italy), Technische Universität Hamburg (Germany), Kauno Technologijos Universitetas (Lithuania) and Universitetet i Stavanger (Norway). These universities are all members of the European Consortium of Innovative Universities (ECIU), a leading international consortium of research intensive universities, with collective emphasis on innovation, creativity and societal impact, driving the development of a knowledge-based economy.
The ultimate goal of ColLab was to put online a platform that all staff involved in teaching and learning activities can use to connect with other individuals with similar interests, increase their knowledge about pedagogical practices and create community dynamics that can generate new projects and collaborations. ColLab aspired to be a tool to combat isolationism in teaching and learning activities and to get people to discuss their practices and learn from the practices of others. By doing this we are creating European teaching and learning Communities of Practice (CoPs), contributing to a European identity, very well aligned with the spirit of the European Universities Alliances. With IO1 delivarable we also produced a good document to support institutional leaders, who now have a literature review on CoPs and can make informed decisions about the institutional creation of this type of staff development initiatives.
The partners, all members of ECIU University, underline the importance of innovation in teaching and learning as a critical factor of our European model of development. Many projects address innovation in teaching and learning, but few focus on creating Communities of Practice (CoPs) that create opportunities for sharing among staff. In opposition to research, there are no routines of intense international collaboration between individuals in teaching and learning activities. The ColLab project wanted to tackle this problem: to generate results that raise awareness of different approaches to CoPs and to create a collaborative space where communities of practice can install their virtual platform.