Abstract:

Technology is changing the way we live in society. Therefore, it is also changing education. One of those changes makes ubiquitous learning ever more present in higher education. As it was pointed out by Dede (2011), with technology classrooms can stop being the primary place for learning and teachers can stop being the primary source of information.

In accordance to this perspective, it looks evident that higher education institutions (HEI) need to adapt. They need to adapt in order to keep playing a vital role in the learning process. Adaptation might pass through the development of new processes of learning that incorporate technology.

With this specific purpose, the University of Lodz promotes, since 2014, a project named GGULIVRR. In the first edition 38 participants from 4 HEI - University of Lodz (Poland), Artesis-Plantijn University College Antwerp (Belgium), Centria University of Applied Sciences (Finland) and Dundalk Institute of Technology (Ireland) - were involved. In 2019, 75 participants from 8 HEI – the original 4 plus ISPGAYA Polytechnic Superior Institute (Portugal), IUT of Lens (France), University of Maribor (Slovenia) and Precarpathian National University (Ukraine) - took part in it. Furthermore, support from the Lodz municipality is granted and support from the corporate side – Fujitsu and MBIT - is also obtained.

In the project, students are grouped in multicultural and interdisciplinary teams for 10 days and challenged to develop a contextual mobile gamified application. They are assisted by experts, lecturers from the different HEI involved, in order to increase the learning potential from the process. The expectation is for students to develop a wide set of soft skills, namely the ones most commonly referred to as being relevant for their future employment, as stated in “The Future of Jobs Report 2018”, from the World Economic Forum, but also their technical skills from whichever scientific area they are from. With this methodology, we do believe to be adapting to technological change making the learning process for the student involved ubiquitous, in the sense that the all experience in which they emerge is a learning process.

In the present article, we make a detailed description of the evolution of the GGULIVRR project from its first edition up to the present date, highlighting its main objectives, the methodology used to implement them, and the results achieved thus far.

Keywords:

Serious Games, International Projects.