Abstract:

Background:
Recently the EU authorized a number of studies to diagnose the European printing and publishing industries, especially in an effort to respond to its recent structural and technological challenges. These reports highlight the changes the sector is undergoing and the need to cope with challenges that lie ahead. One of the major findings of these reports relates to the transformation of this sector over the last two decades. Digitalization and ICT developments have completely transformed the production processes and their output potential. Advances in technology, business models, communications strategies, and consumer needs have led many printers to broaden their services to become one-stop-shops for marketing, design, print and non-print media production and web design. As a result, the old denomination ‘print media’ is outdated and cross-media design and production is more representative of an emerging sectorial focus.
The main issues in the cross-media design and production sector are, that the described change and progress in the working environment isn’t at the moment well reflected in the education and training for this sector. ICT driven approaches that grant access to education for everyone, that creates learning communities beyond classrooms and that allows education across borders and languages is one of the major challenges that has to be mastered.

The CIGN Project:
Working together in the EU funded Intensive Programme Intercultural Design Camp (ICDC) from 2009 – 2013 Artevelde University College Ghent (BE), Linköping University (SE), Stuttgart Media University (DE) and the University of the West of Scotland (UK), which all have a strong focus in educating students for the Creative Industries, feel well prepared to expand the existing collaboration to another level and to tackle the challenges arisen from the change in the cross-media design and production sector. Together with Ryerson University (CAN) it is intended to form a pan-European network for curricular development for the Creative Industries that will identify sectorial skills-gaps, develop curricula to address these, and thus enable opportunities for future employment.

In order to achieve this objective the first step is to improve the quality of present educational programs by developing new curricula through the exchange of best practice and by setting up jointly developed courses, including opportunities for work–related learning in consultation with key sectorial stakeholders. Once disseminated through modular provision at each partner university, opportunities for students have to be created to engage with present and future needs of cross-media design and production industries across Europe and beyond. As an accompanying measure communication strategies and appropriate learning methodologies should be implemented at local, regional, national and international levels forming a lasting international network of stakeholders in training professionals for cross-media design and production.

In order to be able to achieve these challenging goals the partners submitted an Erasmus+ application for the key action 2 – Cooperation and Innovation for Good Practices. The EU accepted this application and will fund the CIGN project starting in September 2014 for a three-year period.

In the final paper a detailed outlook of the project aims will be given and the project plan, the intended actions and the expected outcomes will be described in detail.

Keywords:

Erasmus+, International Network, Creative Industries, Curricular Development.