Collaboration and Innovation for Better, Personalized and IT-Supported Teaching

The Project

Universities in Europe face a variety of challenges. On the one hand, students begin their studies with a varying degrees of knowledge. On the other hand, universities nowadays need to teach interdisciplinary skills as these are needed on today’s job market. In addition, new technologies are gaining importance: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) are available to people who are or who are not enrolled at a university. However, many universities do not yet have a strategy on how to modernize teaching and learning methods.

During the COLIBRI project, seven universities and two companies developed an interdisciplinary blended-learning course on “Future Internet Opportunities”. In online modules, students learn technical basics as well as elements from business, entrepreneurship, communication and cybersecurity. These modules are complemented by a one-week seminar during which students worked in teams on case studies provided by companies. The blended-learning course was tested during the three years of the project. Improvements were made after each yearly cycle. The course contents are now available as Open Educational Resources (OER).

In the follow-up project EPIC, a large number of COLOBRI partners developed and tested methods of problem-based learning and collaboration between universities and companies in order to increase the job market relevance of university teaching contents as well as the employability of students.

Goals

The aim of COLIBRI was to contribute to the modernisation of European Higher Education by developing new and innovative teaching approaches such as personalised and collaborative learning in collaboration with companies as well as through the use of ICT.

aconium responsibilities

aconium GmbH was responsible for the quality assurance of the teaching content and provided consultancy services on broadband technologies as well as case studies for the students.