In a classroom is it often difficult to get students involved in discussion, both with peers and with the teacher. This also means that there are students that seldom are enabled to raise their voice, discuss, or enhance their analytical and social skills in an academic environment. There have been and are many initiatives in order to overcome this challenge. Educational technology and collaborative work are amongst these and both have proven to be effective. Educational technology has the advantages of involving students, raising the engagement and motivation, enhancing peer learning and ensuring easy diagnosis for the student groups when used correctly. It also provides the lecturer with possibilities of facilitating the usage of EdTech, giving immediate feedback to the group and it should be easy to integrate in existing lectures. Collaborative work has the advantages of enhancing social skills, redirecting educational and social strategic goals for the students, as well as enhancing the learning environment. iLikeIT2 wants to combine all these advantages, and develop an online application with appropriate methodological guidelines to enable lecturers to easily and in a time efficient way connect students in a randomized group, and receive responses from all participating students. The students will be able to discuss the task provided by the teacher with peers and try to agree upon a solution. This answer will in turn be submitted and object for plenary discussions facilitated by the teacher. iLikeIt2 will be a variation to the traditional group work, where anonymity and written language will be focused on more than physical contact and verbal expressions. This will be achieved through research based approaches, redeveloping an existing tool and providing all outcomes for free to all interested parties. The consortium, consisting of five partners from Norway, UK, Italy, Spain and Greece, with strong networks both in higher education, lower levels of the school system and in the VET sector, has extensive expertize and experience in transnational projects, and the scrum management method implemented in the project is to ensure all partners have the possibility to utilize their internal strengths. The project mainly targets Higher Education Institutions, mainly because the challenges with collaborative work are bigger when the groups are large and the academic tradition is conservative, but the project develops universal methodology and tools, that can easily be adapted to other sectors, both educational and entrepreneurial. The project mainly targets Higher Education Institutions, mainly cause the challenges with collaborative work is bigger when the groups are large and the academic tradition is conservative, but the project develops universal methodology and tools, that easily can be adopted to other sectors, both educational and entrepreneurial. The project will produce real results that can be used and implemented directly during and after the project’s end. The main results will be a functioning prototype of a response tool that will include a functionality for randomizing the group, request feedback and manipulate results directly at a plenary meeting after the voting ends. Technology is nothing without methodology though, and the consortium will direct its main effort towards making guidelines and a pedagogical strategy for making the software useful for teachers and students. It is also necessary to sustain the system and make the impact higher, which is why the consortium includes Technical specifications as well as an adoption strategy to disseminate and sustain the results further. The project activities include research to validate the outcomes, pilots of parts of the output and/or the whole output, as well as multiplier events to disseminate. Also the development and testing of the new software will be ongoing for the whole period. ILikeIT2 has great potential for making impact all over Europe and in many different sectors of the Educational System. It will be beneficial for all institutions providing education, no matter the size of groups, and will contribute to a change in the way we do collaborative work with student groups.
A new and enhanced way of using response technology when doing collaborative work, especially in HEI Digital skills are vital 21st century skills, and much appreciated in the educational sector. And it is also needed. The questions is how higher education institutions will be able to sustain and improve the quality of the learning experience in the face of continuing growth and diversity in the student population. Educational Technology might provide some answers. iLikeIT2 addresses new needs emerging from demographic changes and increased population growth. New student groups want education that is relative, timely, available on-demand, and fits a specific need. For these reasons and more, we begin to see a shift also in HEIs from traditional colleges to more interactive, technology inspired and internationally oriented institutions. Through combining technology and collaborative work a new way of addressing large classroom environments emerges. All outcomes from the project will be published online and for free use by all interested parties and stakeholders, contributing to open access and opening up education for the public and private sectors.
A mantra in modern teaching is collaboration and active learning in the student group. Drawing heavily on theories developed by Piaget and Vygotsky, constructivism has been a dominating principle on how knowledge is constructed. The idea is that students should participate actively in exactly constructing their knowledge more than simply acquire it passively. Combining this pedagogical aspects and theories with the advancement of new technology, especially response technology involving students directly in the learning environment anonymously, is a way to improve learning outcome in higher education. Thus iLikeIT2 might bring a change in the pedagogy in the 21st Century, that is further enhanced with the major impact of digital tools, skills and opportunities in the educational system arising and constantly being improved throughout the beginning of the century. iLikeIT2 will provide insight into how educational Technology best can enhance collaborative work, and how a response system needs to be designed in order to impact positively on the collaboration in classrooms at different levels of the Educational system. Enhancing collaboration and using technology effectively in large classrooms is much needed in todays society.