Open Education – Page 3 – OpenGame Project

UNIR participates in Keystone third project meeting

26/03/2019/in News /by John Rojas

Last 20-21st March, the third partners meeting of Keystone: Knowledge, Enterprise and Young People – supporting youth transitions in the new economy took place in Lisbon.

During the session, the partners revised the developed activities in the project since the last meeting, and they set the basis for the launch of the social innovation programme to be implemented with young people in risk of exclusion. The programme will be launched in Italy, Greece, UK and Portugal in the next weeks.

The meeting was hosted by the Portuguese partner, Portuguese Catholic University, and represented by the 5 project partners: Arcola Research (UK), Borgorete (IT), Mind2Inn (GR), Univ. Católica Portuguesa (PT), and UNIR (ES). The social innovation programme will be launch in the named ‘community lablets’, physical spaces were the young participants will work with their mentors, and virtually through several online tools implemented by UNIR.

The project started on February 2018 and has a duration of 24 months. It consists on the development of a collaboration programme for young people in risk of exclusion, with the objective of fostering their abilities and teaching them skills requested by the labour market.

Martin Wolpers’ lifetime award to excellence in research, education and significant impact in the society

06/03/2019/in Opinion /by Jose

Martin Wolpers was an excellent project manager that made a significant contribution to the field of Educational Technology in Europe through research projects. Thanks to his efficient and broadly spread work, this field was deeply implemented across a number of countries. He was also a good colleague who knew how to combine rigorous work, integrative negotiation skills and good manners (In memoriam: ES, EN).

Martin died of a heart condition really young and left many things to do behind. Thanks to this award, the European research community honours his memory and the values that stand underneath: a huge sense of commitment to the job and the colleagues, a vocation for a job well done and in time, and a friendly way to combine all of the above for the greater good, and a personal touch.

The 2018 lifetime award will be presented at the International Workshop on Higher Education Learning Methodologies and Technologies Online (HELMeTO). June 6-7, 2019. Novedrate (CO), Italy

Every year, an independent jury selects an outstanding member of the academic, political, social or industrial communities, who has contributed to a significant impact and continuous progress to improve education at any level in practical terms. The Martins Wolper’s Lifetime Award highlights the continuous contribution to science, academia and the society, at large. The main focus of the awarded candidate must be on ICT & Education, Online Learning, Open Education and-or Technology-enhanced Learning and can be from any country in the world. The research institute UNIR iTED founded this award in 2017 and supports every year’s nominations. The selection process strictly watch equity and equality.

The award highlights the lifetime contribution to science, academia and the society

The application will be submitted by, at least, two members of the educational, industrial, social and-or scientific community, related to the afore-mentioned topics.

The applicants will provide a brief cover letter that explains the reasons for the application and the outstanding contribution of the nominee, and a detailed CV of the nominee, along with some contact information.

2018 winner, as promising researcher: Daniele Di Mitri, PhD at Open University of The Netherlands, is awarded with the Martin Wolpers’ Award to the most young promising research with his work titled: “Multimodal Tutor: adaptive feedback from multimodal experience capturing”. More info.

2018 winner, as Lifetime Award: Prof. Dr. Dai Griffiths. Dai is a professor of Educational Cybernetics at University of Bolton who has lived and shaped the educational technology field in Europe for decades. The 2018 lifetime award will be presented at International Workshop on Higher Education Learning Methodologies and Technologies Online (HELMeTO). June 6-7, 2019. Novedrate (CO), Italy. Prof. Griffiths’ profile.

Previous editions:

2017: The Martin Wolpers Award at JTEL 2017 goes to Zacharoula Papamitsiou. More info.
2017: UNIR & ECTEL select Inge Molenaar’s team for the Martin Wolpers Award for the best eLearning paper. More info.

Comanity Project. Getting to know the Greek comunity

07/12/2018/in Opinion /by Jose

In September 20th-21st, 2018, UNIR participated in the second meeting of the Comanity Project. The meeting was hosted by our Greek partner Kethea, the largest rehabilitation and social reintegration network in Greece. It has been providing its services to drug addicts and their families since Ithaki, the first Greek therapeutic community, was set up in 1983.

It was really an interesting and touching experience to meet the parents of some of the kids treated by the centre, and to see how the re-integration and recovery of these kids is approached by this centre.

The meeting was aimed to present and discuss the Comanity IoT (Interactive Online Tool),- designed by UNIR i.e.: the virtual environment for knowledge creation and sharing that will support the learning activities of youth workers and the interaction with stakeholders. Also, we discussed about the training course for youth workers, to become Community Animateurs. Considering this course will have to be delivered online, with the technical support of UNIR, we focused not only on the content of the course material but also on how it should be organised/planned and presented online.

Next crucial steps are: the finalisation of the IoT, the finalisation of the training course material and the development of the online environment hosting the course. The plan is to launch the Iot and the course at the beginning of 2019. Stay tuned for the announcement!

Final Conference of Comanity project in Brussels

28/11/2018/in Report /by John Rojas

The final Conference of the Comanity project took place on November 13, 2019 in Brussels. The results of the project were presented and discussed in a panel with representatives of the European Commission, the European Council, the European Youth forum and with members of the European Parliament.

The project offers to the community of youth workers and of youth work organisations the possibility to develop a new professional profile, the “Community Animateur”.

The Community Animateur’s role is to bridge the existing gap between young people on the margins and ‘mainstream’ institutions by acting as a “Social Mediator”. Community Animateurs come from the community, and are trusted by their peer group. They act as a point of mediation between young people who don’t trust ‘the system’ and the system itself.

During the conference, the experience of the organisations that have experimented the training programme of Comanity where presented and it was shown how – thanks to Comanity – the involved youth workers could create a stronger connection to the groups of youth at the margins living in the area where their youth organization is located, and how engaging them in the solution of problems related to their community improved their situation and mitigated the risk of exclusion.

In the project, UNIR has developed the Comanity online course, which is part of the training programme leading to the acquisition of the required knowledge, skills and attitudes to become a community animateur, and the Comanity Hub, a virtual meeting place for youth workers to exchange learning, experience and knowledge.

Following a piloting phase in youth organisations in the UK, Greece, Spain and Italy, the online course will be available soon to all interested individuals and organizations, stay tuned to know when it will be launched.

To get access to the Comanity Competence Framework for the Community Animateur click here

To visit the project website click here

To get access to the Comanity Hub click here

For more information about the project and to get access to the course please contact:

Stefania Aceto

Project Manager

transfer.opi@unir.net

Research Institute for Innovation & Technology in Education (UNIR iTED)

Vicerrectorado de Proyectos Internacionales

3rd Open Education Policy Forum: Cooperation changes everything

22/10/2018/in Opinion /by John Rojas

This week I had the pleasure to attend the 3rd Open Education Policy Forum (titled “Cooperation changes everything”), organized in Warsaw by the Centrum Cyfrowe. The event counted with the participation of a number of international stakeholders such as the Open Education Consortium or SPARC as well as of policy makers, advisors, researchers and advocates from a number of European countries.

This event was particularly interesting for me – as well as for the iTED Research Institute at UNIR – because it was an occasion to appreciate “in real life” how Open Education policies are developing across Europe and to get updated after the study we run in collaboration with the European Commission’s JRC mapping OE Policies in 28 EU Member States in 2017. I presented some outcomes and reflections from that study during the event, and happily discovered that many Open Education Coalitions exist in a number of central European countries (such as Czech Republic, Poland, Romania and Slovakia) are using the results of the study to keep on advocating for more openness in edition policy in their respective countries.

I particularly enjoyed the discussions on the 10 dimensions of the Cape Town Declaration (in the year of its 10th anniversary) as well as the reflections presented by the Open Education Consortium and UNESCO Slovenian representatives, and was impressed by the capacity of participants to work around practical policy preparation during the workshop organized by my colleague and friend Javiera Atenas. Last but not least, I enjoyed hearing that the OER Policy Register, created some years ago by Creative Commons, will be merged into the OER World Map, thumbs up for Jan Neuman and his team.

In terms of content, the main message I bring home from this event is that “open” is somehow entering in the mainstream education policy discourse. In more and more countries, specific policies and initiatives focussing for instance on OER or open licenses are fading away, leaving space to a more “srtructural” presence of openness instances in general education policy. This is typically the case of Scandinavian countries but also of many others who are using general policy instruments (such as the OGP network) to instill more openness in their education system. Finally, an appreciation for the work of Alek Tarkowski and his team at Centrum Cyfrowe for organizing this event every year and for keeping these important knowledge sharing dynamics alive. See you next year!

Fabio Nascimbeni
October, 15-17, 2018
Warsaw, Poland

UNIR contributes to the second partners’ meeting of the Keystone Project

18/10/2018/in News /by Jose

Hosted by Mind2Innovate, Keystone 2^nd Partners Meeting took place in Athens in September 24^th and 25^th, 2018. During the meeting, the partners revised the work done since the project started and designed the roadmap for the next working period.

Keystone project is financed by the European Commission Programme KA2 “Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices; Strategic Partnerships for youth”. Started on February 2018, it has a duration of two years, and five participant partners from United Kingdom, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

The project aims to develop a collaboration programme addressed to young people at risk of exclusion, with the objective of fostering their skills and teach them some of the competences requested by the market. With a minimum of 100 young people participating in the programme, it will be implemented both in person and virtually, in four different European cities: London, Athens, Perugia and Lisbon.

The programme contemplates the creation of Community Lablets, which are physical spaces where the young people, social workers and entrepreneurs work together. On the other hand, TIC dimension is essential in the project, hence different platforms and tools are being developed for a proper implementation of the programme. UNIR is the partner responsible for the digital environment, which provides training to the young people, hosts the learning content and allows the participants to share their ideas, experiences and do the programme exercises.

Likewise, the project involves local partners, including civic authorities, civil society, residents associations, businesses, education and training services and youth groups, which adds value to existing youth services in local neighbourhoods.

Final Project Partners’ Meeting of the European Project Virtual Tours for Business Culture

18/10/2018/in News /by Jose

The final meeting of Virtual Tours project, hosted by University of Padova, was held on October 4^th and 5^th, 2018, in Padova. During the meeting, the partners analysed the obtained results, laid the foundations for the sustainability and exploitation plan, and defined the tasks to be done for the final reporting.

Virtual Tours is a project financed by the Programme Erasmus+ of the European Commission. Having a duration of two years, it started on November 2016 and finished on October 2018. It counts with seven partners coming from Italy, Spain, Finland and Macedonia. The project aims at increasing and improving opportunities of dialogue between university, students and enterprises, through a training course delivered by a virtual platform developed by UNIR.

The course is addressed mainly to recent graduates in the moment of the transition from the university to the labour market, providing a deeper understanding of the main features of the business culture. It has been implemented in five different languages (English, Italian, Finnish and Macedonian), and has been done in a piloting phase by students from four different European universities, including UNIR.

In the frame of the project, the partners have also organized several virtual sessions in different leading companies from the five participant countries. These sessions consist on online events where the company managers introduce the organisation and processes of their organisation, and answer to questions from the attendees in real time. UNIR has organized two of these sessions, in Telefonica and Adecco Group.

The project has helped the students and recent graduates to acquire competences to facilitate the transition moment from education to the labour market, and as a result, to improve their employability. The companies, apart from their contribution to the project, have obtained a major knowledge of the role they can play to improve the students’ competences, which has permitted an enhanced dialogue with the world of education and attracting appropriate candidates.

Daniele Di Mitri, PhD at Open University of The Netherland, has won the Martin Wolpers’ Award to the most young promising research

12/09/2018/in Opinion /by Jose

In the frame of the Martin Wolpers’ Award, funded by Research Institute for Innovation & Technology in Education (UNIR iTED) at Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR), the Institute has presented for the second year an award to the most promising researcher at the Joint European Summer School on Technology-Enhanced Learning (JTEL).

The winner of this year, Daniele Di Mitri, has been announced at the European Association of Technology Enhanced Learning (EATEL) 2018. The Prize has rewarded not individual papers nor posters but how the young researchers actively connected and positioned their research to the field and society. The other two finalists, selected by EC-TEL and UNIR iTED, have been Sambit Praharaj (Open University of The Netherlands) and Alejandro Ortega-Arranz (Universidad de Valladolid).

Daniele’s work, with title “Multimodal Tutor: adaptive feedback from multimodal experience capturing” is focused on how multimodal data can be supportive for learning. As Di Mitri explains: “Since my background is in Artificial Intelligence, I am very interesting in using multimodal data not simply for analytics but also to generate adaptive feedback through machine learning techniques. For this reason, I follow the Artificial Intelligence in Education and Intelligent Tutoring System Community”.

UNIR iTED and Adecco Group analyse how to fill the gap between education and enterprises

07/08/2018/in Event /by Jose

In July, the 26th, 2018, the online session “How does a recruitment process work in Adecco?” took place. Experts from the company gave the key to increase the employability in the youngsters. The meeting was organized by Research Institute for Innovation & Technology in Education (UNIR iTED) at Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR) in the framework of the project Virtual Tours for Business Culture (Erasmus+). Iria Vázquez Palacios, Director of Service & Quality Department in Adecco Group, and Desirée Montiel, HR Consultant in the company, were invited to the session.

During the event, Vázquez-Palacios described the Adecco Group programmes focused on young people employability like “Redgeneración”, “Factoría de Talento” and “CEO for one month”. As the expert explained, in Spain –where the unemployement rate under 25 exceeds 30%–, there is a big gap between education and what companies demand. In this context, initiatives like Virtual Tours are key to help young people to develop the competences required for the labour market, since finishing higher education is a complex moment where everybody needs orientation, inspiration and self-confidence.

Adecco Group also gave some clues to complete a recruitment process successfully

As Montiel pointed out, among these competences, those known as soft skills are the ones standing out, as they are more related to the personal abilities and to what can be offered to the company than with previous professional experience. The most demanded soft skills are management, work team, adaptation to changes, communication, leadership, flexibility or resilience. The HR expert also gave the attendees some tips to complete a recruitment process successfully, from the composition of a CV to the guidance through every step in a job seek.

In the framework of the V-Tors project, funded by Erasmus+ Programme of European Union, Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR) among other European institutions, have organized various online sessions to enhance the dialogue opportunities between Universities, enterprises and students. In addition to the virtual visits, the consortium has developed an online course (Open Educational Resource) about business culture where students can get first-hand knowledge of the company’s organization.

– Eva Ferreras

A UNIR student sets the image of Keystone European Project

25/07/2018/in Report /by John Rojas

Irantzu García, student of the Bachelor of Arts in Digital & Multimedia Design in Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR), is the winner of the Graphic Design contest for Keystone project organized by Research Institute for Innovation & Technology in Education of Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR iTED) through the International Projects Office.

The contest, named “Keystone Project – Knowledge, Enterprise and Young People, Supporting youth transitions in the new economy” aimed to find the more representative image for Keystone project, financed by European program Erasmus+. The project works to stablish a collaborative program addressed to disadvantage young people in order to enhance their abilities and skills required by the labour market.

As Irantzu García -who has just finished her first year of degree- explains, the designed logo reflects simplicity and freshness, but allows keeping the attention focused on the important aspect: the work done during the project with disadvantaged young people. The project reveals the talent of young people and makes them participate in social innovations through the creation of four innovative spaces in Perugia, London, Athens and Lisbon. For García, the final image goes hand in hand with the project: it is simple but nice, and uses a stable figure like the square, although it plays with the perception by breaking the stability in order to make the picture funnier.

“The designed logo reflects simplicity but allows keeping the attention focused on the important aspect: the work done with disadvantaged young people”

Any student of the Bachelor of Arts in Digital & Multimedia Design, Digital Graphic Design Master Degree and Online Art Direction Master Degree of Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR) could participate in the contest. The jury, composed by staff of the Superior School of Engineering and Technology, and the Vice-rectorate for Knowledge Transfer & Technology, evaluated in a first stage the work, based on the creativity, the composition and the coherence between the elements of the design. In a second stage, and according these criteria, the European partners of Keystone project selected the final design.

Different European institutions participate in this project, together with Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR). UNIR leads the instructional design and the implementation of the open educational program.

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