During the COVID-19-induced pandemic, the entire European Community has been facing serious challenges. The COVID-19 has a strong influence on higher education. The European universities switched to distance learning for the safety of students and teaching staff. The shortcomings of the traditional teaching practice to adopt to pandemic conditions have become more explicit. The main challenges have been: 1) Motivating students for active participation; 2) Organizing laboratory exercises; 3) Assessment of students´ competences. Besides challenges imposed by COVID-19 pandemic, there is a strong need for transformation of education: 1) While in the industrial society the main focus of education was to contribute to the development of procedural knowledge, in the information or knowledge society the development of conceptual and metacognitive knowledge is increasingly considered important; 2) According to modern learning theories, knowledge cannot be transmitted, but has to be constructed by each learner in the appropriate social context; 3) Student-active teaching methods with emphasis on student collaboration and reflection on the learning process are shown to be much more appropriate for the new needs. 4) Assessment methods are shown to be the key factor that steers the way students learn. It is therefore of great importance to develop assessment methods that support development of 21st century skills. Constructive alignment of learning goals, teaching methods and assessment practice is therefore a key issue. The project aims to address the needs of adapting teaching and assessment methods to pandemic conditions, but also adapting the education system to the 21st century (or knowledge-society) needs and state-of-the art pedagogical research; This general objective will be achieved by applying the holistic approach through mutual transnational cooperation among four university partners from Poland, Norway, Serbia and Bulgaria, and a number of additional industrial partners. The basic innovation lies in the holistic approach covering the set of the activities: novel teaching methodology, elaboration of new courses programmes, edition of digital materials (manuals, reports, problems, exercises, tests, etc.), writing textbooks and training of academic teachers to involve them in this new teaching way. The specific objectives of the project are as follows: 1) To develop a methodology for problem-based teaching and corresponding assessment methods suitable for use in pandemic conditions, and put them into context of modern learning theories; 2) To develop methodology for teacher training that facilitates adoption of the new teaching and assessment practice; 3) To develop digital teaching and learning materials in the selected areas of ICT based on the above approach. The following results will be achieved: 1) The innovative problem-based methodology under pandemic conditions will be developed and will be supported by appropriate digital presentations. 2) Digital resources will be created in educating teachers for acquiring new skills related to the problem-based methodology. Detailed schedules, presentations and recorded movies will be accessed at the project website. 3) Digital teaching resources will be created in selected areas of ICT applicable for a group of problem-based courses. At least eight courses will be modernized. The introduction-to-lecture movies, interactive lecture presentations, project statements, lab exercises and online exam tests will be created. 4) At least three multimedia books will be prepared with the aim to enable students to follow online lectures and prepare exams under pandemic conditions. A collection of students’ lab projects sharing best practices within partner universities will be edited. The target groups that will be addressed are students, teachers, higher education institutions and industrial companies. The innovative products in the field of education produced during project duration will be available via a website. Results will be presented to the higher education and industrial community through multiplier events, TV and newspapers interviews, as well as on social and professional networks. We will share the results of this project through four conference or journal papers in the field of education. These results will make higher education to be more attractive for nowadays students and will improve its quality. The level of digital competence of teachers and students will be improved. The links among students and companies will be established or enhanced. The universities will attract a larger number of domestic and foreign students. Some of the long-term goals are to continue collaboration among four partner universities through the programme “European universities” and to increase students' employability.
The aim of this project was to introduce the PBL method in teaching 8 subjects together with a whole set of digital educational materials containing, among others, topics to be developed before the lecture, multimedia presentations, instructions for laboratory exercises, sample reports, questions and final tests. This way of teaching can be implemented in the conditions of a pandemic without causing worse achievement of the planned learning outcomes. To achieve the above goal, we trained a team of teachers to collaborate with student teams and develop modern digital educational materials. The use of this teaching method in different semesters will enable better preparation of graduates for the requirements of the modern labour market.
We applied for this project to achieve two major goals: adapting teaching and assessment methods in particular courses to pandemic conditions, and introducing the PBL method as a tool for increasing the students' motivation and prepare them better for the needs of labour market. We took into account the need to train teachers in the following topics: conducting classes using the PBL method, working with student teams (including team selection, conflict resolution, assessment methods, etc.), developing interesting educational materials, and preparing presentations. We responded to the needs of students for online access to modern multimedia educational materials, creating them in various forms (short films, animated presentations, links to important sources of information, digital textbooks). To enhance their motivation we applied the practical activities already at the schedule of the first semester. We also tried to correlate Mathematics content with Circuit Theory, so that the topics were related to each other in individual weeks of the semester.