The SLIDE project aimed to intertwine the service-learning (SL) pedagogy with digital empowerment (DE) in order to promote inclusion (I) and diversity. The objectives were to: (1) strengthen service-learning (SL) as a pedagogical approach that promotes inclusion and diversity, as well as digital empowerment of the ones lagging behind the most, embedding and developing civic engagement within higher education students, teachers, and communities in Europe; (2) equip students with digital capabilities and skills necessary for the use of technology in creative, critical, competent, and inclusive ways through SL activities that address human, social, and environmental needs from the perspective of social justice; (3) increase the capacity and readiness of teachers to manage an effective shift towards digital education, to encourage their purposeful and inclusive use of digital technologies for teaching, as well as the development of digital pedagogy and expertise in the use of digital tools; (4) facilitate the exchange and co-creation of knowledge on SL and DE in Europe, consolidate institutional and national commitments and enable a culture of promotion and public articulation of university-community partnership through SL.
The education shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic brought into sharp focus three acute needs of contemporary education that shaped the outlines of the SLIDE project: 1) a need to digitally empower university teachers who rapidly needed to transform from teaching professionals into learning experience designers and experts in emerging technologies, 2) a need to close the gap between self-perceived and actual digital competences of university students by equipping them with digital fluency, intelligence, and engagement skills, but also with pedagogical skills to sensitize them towards digital inclusion and to empower them to address sensitive contemporary societal issues while developing their digital competences, and 3) a need to combine the digital empowerment of teachers and students with the pedagogical approach of Service-Learning for the promotion of diversity an inclusion, while establishing connections between higher education institutions and communities at risk, either in direct proximity or rural/remote areas. The project answered to the growing need to promote inter-connected higher education systems, stimulate innovative learning and teaching practices, digital empowerment, inclusion, and diversity, and active citizenship.