Funding Calls – Digital Learning Dispatches

The NIDL team is pleased to be a member of the DigiTeL Pro Strategic Partnership (Professional Development for Digital Teaching and Learning) supported by funding through the Extraordinary Erasmus+ Coronavirus response. This project involves seven European university partners and is being led by EADTU, with the first full-day kick-off meeting taking place next week.

About DigiTeL

The COVID-19 crisis required many higher education institutions throughout Europe to switch overnight to online distance education. Attempts were made under challenging circumstances to create solutions for online active learning, online student interactions, both synchronously and asynchronously, and e-assessment. With the commencement of the new academic year came increased emphasis on improving the quality of the student online learning experience.

Set against this backdrop, the objective of the DigiTeL Pro Strategic Partnership is to build the capacity of higher education institutions to provide high quality, inclusive digital education, responding to the needs of universities for the remainder of the Corona crisis and beyond. The project team brings together a group of experienced online educators well-known for their research and innovation in digital education. Project outputs include an analysis of major lessons from the COVID-19 crisis, support for maturing institutional policy and strategy for the post-pandemic environment, the design, development and implementation of continuous professional development for a range of delivery modes (blended, hybrid and online distance education), and several initiatives to enhance students’ readiness for digital learning. The NIDL team is leading the student-focused work package and related deliverables.

Learn more during Empower Webinar Week

If you would like to learn more about the DigiTeL Pro Strategic Partnership, then next Tuesday, April 6th, at 13:00 (Irish time) members of the project team will be sharing further details as part of the Empower Webinar Week (6th-8th, April). During the week, you can participate in a series of webinars dedicated to better understanding the opportunities of digital education during and after the pandemic. In a webinar starting at 12:30pm (Irish time) on Wednesday April 7th, Dr Eamon Costello from the NIDL, for example, will be sharing his speculative educational futures post-pandemic. In each session there will be time reserved for reflection and questions from you, the participants.

More information on the full programme and a registration link appears on the Empower Webinar Week webpage. We look forward to sharing more over the course of the week.

This is the second post in a series describing some of the recent externally funded projects secured by the NIDL team at Dublin City University (DCU). In partnership with Tampere University of Applied Sciences, the NIDL was successful in securing almost €1m of external funding for a project intended to promote equity and access to higher education through Open and Distance Learning (ODL). Known as the BUKA Project, the aim is to help enable increased access to higher education for people in rural and remote regions as well as those with diverse backgrounds (e.g. mature age students, working students, first-in-family students, students with learning difficulties) in Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. Local partner universities include:

New NIDL Small All Partner Countries belong to Region 6, Asia. When designing the project, special care has been taken to involve the key decision makers in all the partnering universities as key staff in the BUKA project. This is to ensure that the project deliverables align with local institutional priorities and the project team helps to develop local solutions for local problems.

This European funded project falls under Project Category 2, “Improving Management and Operation of Higher Education Institutions”, and, more specifically, under “Equity, Access to, and Democratisation of Higher Education”, including disadvantaged groups and regions.

The specific objectives of the project include:

Building the capacity of teaching, technical and instructional design staff in the partner HEIs in inclusive instructional design and learning analytics;
Improving learner engagement and retention through inclusive instructional design and learning analytics;
Improving pedagogical and technical accessibility of online and blended learning materials; and,
Providing more effective and personalised support for online distance learners in partner HEIs.

The first project meeting takes place in Malaysia in early February 2020 but members of the project team will also meet up at November’s ICDE World Conference on Online Learning in Dublin.