Abstract:

The aim of the paper is to introduce effective practices of e-service learning in three EU countries: Croatia, Italy and Romania. Compared to traditional service-learning which, according to the evidence from European Observatory of Service-Learning in Higher Education (https://www.eoslhe.eu/), has already spread its roots in many European countries, e-Service-Learning (e-SL), where the instructional component, the service component or both occur online, has only recently come into focus as a response to Covid-19.

In University of Zagreb (Croatia) in 2020-2021, e-SL projects were implemented in the field of information sciences, where robots and Minecraft Education were used by university students to digitally empower the school children, but also to teach them foreign language and cultural heritage. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and in the wake of the earthquake that hit the country, all e-SL projects were implemented as extreme SL, where both learning and service occurred entirely online. The community partners were city libraries with a need to promote the new collection available for young users. Children developed the interest in programming, robotics, logical thinking, communication and foreign language skills.

In Italy, the formative offer on transferable skills of the University of Bologna includes two Service-Learning & Community Engagement Lab courses. In 2020-2021 community partners offered students the chance to be involved in e-SL, as they were still struggling with pandemic restrictions and uncertainty due to the COVID-19. Students had the opportunity to set up a virtual SL museum as part of their extreme-SL project. The museum developed using Mozilla Hub platform hosts result of the projects developed in partnership between 16 community organizations and 43 students. It allows visitors to experience a realistic environment and to leave feedback on SL projects and protagonists, as in a real art exhibition. Students’ reflective journals showed that the opportunity to contribute to the first Italian SL virtual museum with their “pieces of virtual art” was perceived as a valuable way to consolidate civic culture and promote SL. Students recognized that e-SL contributed to the development of their civic competences, in some cases being more sustainable (and inclusive) than traditional SL.

SL projects in University Politehnica of Bucharest (Romania) that were initially planned as traditional SL within the ENGAGE STUDENTS project (engagestudents.eu) were implemented as extreme-SL projects due to the Covid outbreak that imposed restrictions in human face-to-face interactions. In order to cope with this unexpected change, a Service-Learning Hub was developed to offer an interaction platform between students, teachers and community partners. This paper brings outcomes, experiences and lessons learnt during the implementation of two SL projects. Monitoring off-grid systems through IoT solutions project aimed at developing a monitoring system for the electrical parameters of an off-grid solution that can forecast energy production and thus a more efficient use of renewable energy sources and indoor air quality monitoring via RESTful API. The HVAC control via IoT project addressed the development of an IoT solution for collecting the air quality parameters and process data to sustain a comfortable living environment in a residential building.

Keywords:

E-Service-Learning, Transnational approach, Extreme Service-Learning, Minecraft Education, robotics, virtual Service-Learning museum, IoT solutions.