Digital Challenge in Higher Education

Description

The project starts from the observation that, currently, the academic community perceives that it’s still difficult to define elearning standards able to inform academic governance and stakeholders about the quality of e-learning processes. The definition of these standards relies on the intersection among policy, technology, education, society, and the labour market. Several non-formal standards have been produced in the past decade, such as OLC, ECB Check, e-XCELLENCE, OPAL, among others. The majority considers quality standardisation, mainly, through a quantitative perspective for benchmarking goals, missing the main important aspects of the learning process: the educational (inter-and intra-) relationship among tutors, students and groups operating in new techno-social environments. Considering this complexity, D-ChallengHE recognises the need to produce and validate a set of new online Quality Assurance Standards able to consider the qualitative dimension of teaching interaction in online learning environments, and the necessity to communicate best practices at the European level, so as to:

• Provide decision-makers and Higher Education Institutions useful insights for the definition of data-driven intervention strategies;
• Contribute to the European debate on modernization of the HE sector by establishing cooperation networks among diverse educational institutions (universities, research centres, training institutions, digital publisher and developers);
• Promote a digital culture, with a multi-stakeholder approach that takes account of the systemic complexity introduced by ICT which involves numerous social and organisational practices, contexts, and learning models;
• Develop a new pedagogical approach for an innovative vision of European e-learning in HE, through the production of an innovative perspective, attentive to the qualitative dimension of online teaching and key teaching competencies in the digital era