LOOKING TO THE FUTURE - ADAPT2JOBS PROJECT IS JUST THE BEGINNING

In the past decade, education and technology merged in their effort to offer the best learning experience one can get. The outstanding ICT progress allowed new developments in delivering learning materials and supporting learning process to become student – centred. Exploring new teaching methods and developing new learning ecosystem, more engaging and user friendly, became a challenging goal to be achieved for universities and also for IT companies oriented toward education. Today more than ever, Universities should reshape their educational offer being more engaged in developing study programs oriented toward the future needs of the labour market. Actually today we suppose to build skills and competencies to our students in order to meet the professions of the future. Teacher’s role in education is changing rapidly, from traditional knowledge transfer to partnership in learning, teachers and students are engaged in discovering new ways to knowledge acquiring and applying. The goal of a modern teachers should be to provide to his students the ability to acquire new knowledge and the capacity to solve real problems using digital opportunities.

In this context was implemented an 18 months project - Adapt2jobs (www.adapt2jobs.ro). This project starts in May 2014 and ends in November 2015, being a European- funded project, with a view to adapting teaching methods and academic curricula to the labour-market demands.

Working together with IT specialists, our project experts, teachers from three domains : Economics, Social Sciences and Art & Architecture, have developed a new learning environment. Knowledge transfer occurred via digitized content, students being encouraged to discover how concepts are linked to the methods/techniques that make them applicable in the real life. The project aims to develop the following competencies: critical thinking, problem solving, mastering new software, improving communication skills. A significant part of the project implementation was to test the students ‘performances that have accepted to enrol and to use the facilities provide by the new learning ecosystem. A secondary objective established was to improve students’ responsibility in managing the own learning process.

In order to evaluate the project impact and to measure the student’s performances a set of surveys were designed mainly to gather relevant data about student’s experience, students’ assessments results and to collect student’s improvement suggestions. The paper aims to present the surveys’ results which link the project outcomes to students’ experience and to introduce new developments of the Adapt2jobs learning ecosystem.

The project sustainability is important for us therefore a strategy was designed and we have start looking for appropriate resources to be implemented.