The project addresses two issues that are on the agenda in the current situation with corona-conditioned low mobility and international cooperation: The digitalisation of higher educational teaching and the development of alternative internationalisation formats. The project recognises that the digitisation of teaching in conjunction with the quality requirements for academic education poses great challenges for individual teachers. Simultaneously, the internationalisation of teaching and the European integration through student exchange is a major task for the universities. Mobility rates are to be increased, especially in the context of educational networks such as the European universities. However, parallel to this, the restrictions imposed by the pandemic in the medium term and by necessary reactions to the climate crisis in the long term will mean that more and more virtual mobility formats will have to be developed. The project DIONE aims to develop an answer to these two challenges. To this end, the project will first develop twelve innovative, medium-length, open teaching courses in an international and interdisciplinary network within the humanities. These will address selected topics in language, literature and cultural studies in combination with digital research methods. Critical evaluation of digital data and methods will be a core element of the courses. The developed courses will be offered in several digital formats and teaching scenarios to increases applicability on the part of teachers and to ensure inclusiveness. In addition, the courses contain units that are directed at the digital competences of the teachers themselves. The courses thus offer important digital, topic-specific and thus concrete, application-oriented competences on three levels: digital research methods for students, digital key and teaching competences for teachers and critical digital literacy. The courses comprise approximately five sessions, are multilingual and include examples of practice or application from different European cultural, linguistic, political or historical contexts researched by the partners. The DIONE project addresses the issue of mobility with another innovative element: The developed courses will be used in a second step to enable transnational micro-collaborations between the teachers of the participating educational institutions. Micro-collaborations mean that teachers at two different universities use the multilingual content and formats of the open courses to enable their students to collaborate virtually with the students of the partner university for the duration of these courses. Since the courses are shorter learning units, integration into the ongoing teaching can be achieved flexibly. The use of the courses and the cooperation will be encouraged via a common platform. The planned outcome of the project is thus, that university lecturers in the humanities use digital formats together to teach subject-specific digital skills and their critical handling. We plan to create a competence model for the addressed competences, compile the topic-specific learning content, create training material for the teachers, digitise the content in different formats and publish it on a joint platform. Finally, the courses will be tested in pilot micro-collaborations between the partners and the results and recommendations will be published in a white paper. The project will be carried out by 30 teachers from language, literature and cultural studies, NGO staff and other experts. The consortium will use agile project management focusing on a democratic, transparent, multilingual and multicultural processes to anchor the European idea both in the creation and in the results. With this project, we want to contribute to systematizing the way we talk about and work with teaching activities that foster research-related and critical digital skills. The integration of concrete topics areas will have a direct positive impact on the educators who teach them, as it will serve to stimulate further developments of their teaching. The platform will provide networking possibilities that will lead to enduring inter-university exchanges of practices beyond the current project. It will inspire the launch of open and digital educational initiatives at the partner universities as well as at other universities seeking inspiration. With the concept of transnational micro-collaboration, DIONE revolutionises the way transnational teaching will be organised in a sustainable yet flexible way. Thus, the project aims at contributing to the creation of a joint European Campus for the partner universities, especially the European University Circle U. following the EU's "Digital Education Action Plan" as well as the "Renewed Agenda for Higher Education in the EU".
As a result of our project activities, international cooperation in higher education beyond physical student mobility and teacher mobility should intensify by using small, flexible formats. Our aim was also that teachers increasingly use ready-made and open teaching materials to promote the digital competencies of their students in transnational teaching cooperations. The competencies should relate to digital skills relevant to research as well as to the development of a critical attitude towards digital tools and data.
We carried out this project for two reasons: firstly, we wanted to develop a new format that would enable ourselves and others to establish international teaching collaborations despite administrative hurdles. Our second goal was to develop Open Educational Resources and thus support their promotion within the humanities, on the one hand, and to promote digital research skills among teachers, on the other. We also wanted to take advantage of the opportunity that arose from the establishment of the European University Alliance, of which four of our project partners are members, to deepen the cooperation between our universities and at the same time to provide an impulse for the network to grow together. The needs that we addressed with our project therefore relate to the development and establishment of a new internationalisation format, which can ensure intensive and broad cooperation in teaching despite the pandemic situation at that time and the limited travel possibilities that will also exist in the future. We also clearly saw a need for the development of digital competences among students and teachers in the humanities and the availability of teaching materials that could be used to develop these competences.