Aims of the project

The current COVID-19 crisis has greatly accelerated the need for modernization and digital transformation of education and training systems across the Europe. Meanwhile, our aim is to educate future professionals who must have, alongside with the study field specific competences, innovation competences, i.e., the ability to participate into innovation processes. But how to teach, learn and assess the complex cognitive behavior needed in the creation of innovations in online, blended and distance learning context?

There are already promising validated methods and tools to assess and develop innovation competences in educational context, such as the FINCODA assessment tool. However, the recent sudden shift to online and distance learning has shaken up higher education institutions’ (HEIs) pedagogical practices and shown that HEIs lack knowledge, skills and tools to use those methods and tools in online context.

The goal of this project is to reinforce the ability of HEIs to provide high quality education by applying innovation pedagogy in digital context in order to develop and assess innovation competences in online, blended and distance learning. The partnership will promote networking of institutions across the partner countries sharing resources and expertise and enhance collaboration with experts in educational technologies and relevant pedagogical practices.

The project results consist of the following elements:

• The roadmap of digital learning environment creates a framework and shared understanding for all the HEIs that struggle with the problem of identifying, developing, and assessing innovative behaviour of learners in various digital learning environments.
• The re-validated assessment tool to identify, assess and develop innovation competences in online learning situations 
• The online assessment training package supports teachers to create online learning situations which permit observation and assessment of innovative behaviour.
• The practical toolbox enables teachers to help students develop their innovation competences in digital learning contexts and provide both, teacher and student, with support in the learning process. The toolbox includes all the main aspects of pedagogical storyline, and helps educators not only to use the methods and activities supporting learning of innovation competence in digital context, but also to create a motivational, safe and encouraging atmosphere to learn and develop these skills.

All these results will be developed through a participative design thinking methodology in different authentic pilots with a minimum of 20 educators and 600 learners from all partner countries.