As part of the blended-learning project COLIBRI, a teacher training seminar took place in Riga last week, where teaching material was developed for the summer term 2017. The project, launched in 2014, aims to improve the teaching of higher education through innovative teaching methods.
The results from last year were discussed and reflected. Compared to the previous year, a significant increase in the projects´ relevance for teaching and the labor market could be seen in the evaluations by the students. This is encouraging further efforts towards the practical application and cooperation with the companies. This relationship is made particularly by the implementation of case studies from the companies’ hands. The students work on these real life case studies in groups after passing 10 online modules that provide the theoretical foundations. aconium GmbH is responsible for the design of two such case studies. The proposals were presented in the seminar in order to improve the relevance of the theoretical foundations in the online modules.
The project
COLIBRI stands for “Collaboration and Innovation for Better, Personalized and IT-Supported Teaching”. The project is funded by Erasmus+. Seven universities and three industrial partners are working jointly on a blended-learning course on “Future Internet Opportunities”. The teaching methods are applied every year in a “Living Lab”, in which four students of each university participate in project meetings, and are evaluated at the end of the semester. The project runs for three consecutive yearly cycles. The first two years have already passed; new teaching methods are now being tested in the third and last year, such as peer assessment workshops or videos in which quizzes appear directly in the video.