Abstract:

A priority for higher education is to develop students’ technical as well as innovation and entrepreneurship skills so that they can make a successful transition from university to the workplace. Having this premise in mind, part of the mission of EIT Digital (a Knowledge and Innovation Community from the EIT, European Institute of Innovation and Technology) is to train IT graduates at both Master’s and Doctorate levels, with strong innovation and entrepreneurial competences. Top European universities, researchers and leading businesses are in partnership with EIT Digital to provide cutting-edge ICT education in combination with innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) education. To implement the I&E education, each partner university in the EIT Digital network implements an “Innovation & Entrepreneurship” (“I&E”) minor, and this minor is composed of 30 ECTS (European Credits Transfer System) in a 120 ECTS 2-year Master’s program, which corresponds to 25% share of the credits each student takes during the studies on I&E education. Unlike technical knowledge, I&E skills rarely become obsolete and they can be applied to a broader range of jobs, disciplines, careers and circumstances, which makes them even more attractive to study how to implement suitably in our distributed context. In a context where online education was more popular than ever, it was decided to develop a blended learning strategy, and in this blended strategy the teachers that belong to the community are also producers on behalf of the entire community. The deployment of the blended strategy was successful, helping even more to the cause of homogenizing the I&E Minor within and between the different Master’s programs at the Universities, and giving a common ground for understanding and interpretation of the various I&E concepts commonly presented at the different Universities. EIT Digital, building on the blended learning I&E initiative, and wanting to even more enhance the presence of the Digital transformation as topic in the education curriculum as well as to exploit in full potential the knowledge available in the network, started working on building the portfolio of online courses to be offered to all the students part of the EIT Digital network of universities. In this paper we will present the first courses resulting from this effort, as well as strategies on how we plan to evaluate student satisfaction and oversee learning pathways and retention initiatives in order to understand if the approach is successful or not.

Keywords:

Online education, I&E education, Distance Education, ePortfolios, Remote courses.