Abstract:

Learning Community isn’t a new concept, but still a new or renewable trend of pedagogical practices in educational contexts in view of the emergency of a culture in which everyone is involved in a collective effort. Successful higher education must open itself to a process of helping young people to better understand the world and be educationally empowered to contribute to society (UNESCO, 1998). In this alignment, Bologna’ reform highlight comfort locus to learning communities, communities of practice or communities of inquiry. However, while there is horizontal consistency in curriculum intentions about the competences to lead the 21st century across different frameworks, converging on a common set of skills and stressing the importance of collaboration, communication, ICT literacy, social and cultural competences including citizenship, and also mentioning creativity, critical thinking, productivity and problem-solving (Voogt & Roblin, 2012), the procedures to get those intentions implemented are largely diverse, fuzzy or hindering. This project aims to proceed with the academic goal of creating an active learning community that turns effective the cooperation and collective, concurrently to self-regulated learning; conscientiousness of the societal needs and at the same time shared awareness and networking in solving real problems. The foundation of a Community of Active Learning on the principles of experiential and collaborative learning looks for knowledge transfer to solve problems situated in the larger society. Such a Community will operate as a center service for people and organizations, coping with problems or challenges polarized in an operational research unit or projects management of multidisciplinary initiative. In the basis of the projects-design will be the involvement of the three scientific areas lectured at the University Department where the Community is rooted (Psychology, Sciences of Education and Social Work). But all university community is invited to collaborate. The projects listed from situational analysis or stakeholders requests will be organized in systematic data-bases opened up to all the potential collaborators (students, academic experts, partners). The Community should be sustainable on the emphasis of diverse literacies, through a participatory and innovative combinatorial design of tools for developing and evaluating learning processes. Privilege is given to “innovative” tools and strategies, such as technological enhanced learning and game based learning methods. Inserting a non-formal learning device into a classical educational structure we believe we are contributing to updating the vertical consistency in a paradigm that clusters knowledge and skills of psycho-social-educational agents into situated learning projects that are significant for all the academic, scientific or civilian subsystems. The results of this project in progress, which we present here for discussion, are the basics of the Learning Community Logic Model for make it transformational. This developmental guide to innovate higher education outlines involvement practices, profiling a strategic approach, by preventing resources, requirements and predicting the impact of the project to the kickoff of a community specializing in Serious Games.

Keywords:

Learning Community, Technological-Enhanced Learning, Game-Based Learning, Situated Learning.