Erasmus+
D-PBL
The objectives of the D-PBL project are grounded in three dimensions:
- giving sense to technical skills by providing a real context for the learning path;
- giving effective digital competencies that are useful for business;
- and integrating students into real multi-national teams.
Partial specific objectives include:
- assessing lecturers’ digital skills (as their digital skills should be solid to teach them to students);
- training lecturers in the necessary blend of digital and pedagogic competencies;
- conceiving the space (room) where students and lecturers will work on their projects, enabling both the technical context and digital apparatus, i.e. create the D-PBL cell;
- and organizing multi-national teams working on business problems and finding solutions, while communicating via digital technologies.
Identified Needs
Most students who finish their courses at HEIs acquire technical skills. But do they know the purpose of such skills? Are they prepared to apply them in their jobs? And the technical skills do not represent the full story. Businesses live in a global, digitally connected world. Today’s students are digital natives. Do they have the necessary digital competencies, like collaborative work using digital technologies?
The D-PBL project aims to combine digital teaching-learning with project-based learning and apply in an international context. PBL focuses on problem-solving and solution-seeking, providing students with a rich learning path, given that the job market increasingly demands transversal skills in teams to achieve a better collective intelligence effort.
D-PBL promotes outcome-oriented learning while integrating transdisciplinary approaches with innovative active pedagogic practices. Students, mainly, and lecturers, jointly, are the target groups addressed in the project. The former benefit from increasing their digital competencies, above all those that will be structural when they enter their jobs, and also benefit from a recent but effective pedagogical learning process that focuses both on technical and transversal competencies. The latter benefit from an update of their digital competencies and improving their pedagogical skills, likewise, becoming more effective while lecturing, and, at the same time, establishing a mutual communication platform with their students. Together, all benefit from inclusion in Europe, exchanging learning experiences and progressing with other European colleagues, but avoiding the inconvenient, time-consuming and costly travelling and settling in. Collaborating in the creation of methodologies and tools aimed at developing specific student competencies will enable teachers/lecturers to act in correspondence with the HE institutions’ strategy and better respond to current societal needs.
Goal and Target Groups
The aim of the D-PBL project is to combine digital teaching–learning (EAD) with project-based learning (PBL), applied in a multi-national context, for the benefit of HE students and lecturers. The main target groups of D-PBL project are higher education students and lecturers. Both students and lecturers will be selected from the partner institutions’ academic community. All the partners have direct access to the target groups, ensuring a large user base that will be involved in the project activities and benefit from its results/impact. This user base will be widely extended once the project implements its dissemination and exploitation plan reaching other HE institutions at regional/national and European levels. Students, mainly, and lecturers, jointly, are the target groups addressed in the project.
Methodology
The first output (O1) is the Digital Competencies Survey. This output is divided into two separate deliverables:
- first, the survey itself is to be applied to HE lecturers/teachers to ascertain whether they have the required EAD skills; it takes less than 3 minutes to accomplish;
- second, the analysis of the responses collected results in a suggested learning path of digital skills for education (see O2).
The project developed the Training Toolkit for Teachers (O2), which is deployed in Moodle. This toolkit follows the DigCompEdu framework. The training toolkit is for:
- Level A (Newcomer and Explorer) lecturers/teachers who can freely attend the course online;
- Level B (Integrator and Expert) lecturers/teachers who can freely attend the course online;
- Instructors that deliver the course in-situ for Level A lecturers/teachers; they have access to the complete set of learning materials.
The toolkit training includes videos, texts, website visits, and quizzes on technical, pedagogical, and behavioural features. This toolkit aims at capacitating lecturers/teachers so they can implement digital-based active learning pedagogies in their classes and use the digital cells in the 2 π classroom (see O3).
In D-PBL, we designed and built a proof-of-concept of the 2 π Learning Space (O3). The 2 π Learning Space is a directionless classroom specifically designed to implement active learning pedagogies, especially PBL. It is grounded on scientific literature and other examples from leading universities. Its architecture encompasses the Digital D-PBL Cells, which are intended to favour group working on projects. They are the PBL group “headquarters”, from which most of the multidisciplinary teamwork is carried out.
Finally, the project produced the D-PBL Guidelines for digital project-based teaching-learning (O4). These guidelines resume the results gathered during the implementation of the project, both on development and piloting in a real classroom context. They serve as a reference for other higher education organizations and initiatives in this field.
Expected Results
– Advancement of HE students’ transversal skills and employability.
– Enhancement of ICT and pedagogical skills of HE lecturers/teachers.
– Contributing to boosting virtual mobility and exchange in higher education across Europe.
– Contributing to the development of new educational models in the EHEA (European Higher Education Area), focusing on employability, interdisciplinary and international teamwork, and virtual environments.
– Granting minority, disadvantaged groups of students a real opportunity to experience internationalization during their studies, eliminating barriers to international mobility and promoting equity.
– Offering a unique benchmark to universities willing to adopt similar pedagogies allowing them to observe and setup their own digital cells and benefit from our prior experience and support. Students will gain new competencies in distance project work based on real problems, combining and using the benefits of new technologies.
News & Update
Training toolkit for improving digital competences of teachers @ Moodle – The D-PBL Newsletter
We present to you the Moodle course for improving the digital competences of teachers,...
Digital Competencies Survey – The D-PBL NEWSLETTER
We’re excited to invite you to take part in our Digital Competencies Survey, developed...
Testimonials & Partner
The European Commission’s support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
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