Abstract:

The textile and clothing industry is a traditional but important industry with around 160.000 companies and about 1.5 million employees in Europe. On the other hand, textile education is offered in several European Universities. Because of the evolution, the Textile and Clothing industry is facing in areas such as automatic cutting systems, IT supported product design and manufacturing, robotization of task, the required skills of an employee are largely impacted. In current curricula in higher textile education, digital skills and entrepreneurship are often unjustly underestimated or even neglected. Therefore, the ICT-TEX project aims to provide an answer to this gap by developing a dedicated curriculum of “Information Technology in Design of Textile and Clothing” for students with an engineering bachelor's degree, for teachers, and for staff members who are already active in the Textile and Clothing Industry.

In last year’s EDULEARN21 edition was reported on how the project is approached, the outcome of the work in project year 2021 is presented.

The ICT-TEX project is an Erasmus+ Knowledge Alliance joining 12 European partners of universities, companies, and non-profit organisations. They are geographically spread over Europe and form a balanced group of expertise that is brought into the project.

The syllabuses developed within the ICT-TEX project are structured into 8 modules, two of them are on general skills such as ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) and Entrepreneurship, the other six modules are related to specific textile areas. All with a special focus on digital skills needed within these fields. The areas covered within the project are Design and Production of Woven Fabrics, Knitwear, Technical & Smart Textiles, Finishing, Printing & Functionalisation and Apparel Design and Production. A MOODLE platform is selected to make the developed courses available for online self-study on the ICT-TEX and AUTEX websites. For three of these modules, pilot training workshops are organised for students, teachers, and staff to provide feedback on the delivered educational material and to improve the courses where needed.

The curriculum and syllabuses developed within the ICT-TEX project will be openly available on the project website for any professional in the Textile and Clothing Industry having the need to improve his/her skills in information technology, more specifically in one of the five topics worked on in this project. All courses will become available this year 2022.

Keywords:

Textile education, online learning.