Domain: Fostering institutional engagement and change
Best practice title: Distributed student activities
Best practice summary: The settings address the problem of pedagogical cooperation between Universities on a pan-European level and we investigate benefits and challenges of distributed student activities between different Universities.
By whom: EIT Digital
Key ingredients / description:
We co-design cross-university settings in which students physically located at distant Universities can collaborate with each other. The following distributed students activities have been already experimented:
- – Innovation and Entrepreneurship basics course: for the needs of the course the teachers from two different Universities came up with a unique syllabus based on online contents, shared assignments, and put together the students coming from two different Universities in the same online course. This improved student engagement and provided possibilities to meet other students / network in the online sphere. The students work on small projects together, and have pitching exercises, presenting the outcomes from an assignment that they have been working on during the class, to improve their presentations and pitching skills.
- Business Development Lab course: for the needs of the course two Universities collaborate by creating a mixed groups of students, and the groups work together to deliver peer-reviews of the submissions of the other groups, the groups exist and collaborate only online, for the practical part of the course, the students work individually. This kind of assignment was aimed to help their ability to work in distributed teams.
- Innovation and Entrepreneurship elective course: The collaboration consisted of lectures given in front of students coming from both of the universities, transmitted via webinar, by lecturers coming from both locations. After each such lecture, the respective lecturer delivers an assignment to the students at both locations, the assignments are peer-reviewed by the students from both of the Universities. The students for this work in teams at both ends in order to improve their ability to work in teams.
- Innovation and Entrepreneurship study course, in this course the students work in groups on a case study throughout the course. At two different Universities there are local groups, that is groups composed only of local students working on the delivery of a case from the local ecosystem of the respective University, while there are also shared groups, composed of members coming from both Universities involved, working on an international case. The group members need to work together to deliver the case and like this improve their abilities to work in distributed teams as well as their ability to work in international teams.
Links (if any): https://ieonline.eitdigital.eu/
Key success factors / How to replicate:
Here we provide online collaboration schemes for distributed running of courses that are scalable and that can be implemented in any network of Universities.
The common problems reported were mainly of a technological nature and problems with finding adequate technology to do webinars in front of audiences present in two different locations, so in order to have a successful implementation it is important to select technology wisely.
Contact person: Galena Pisoni, galena.pisoni@univ-cotedazur.fr
Keywords: (at least 5): Distributed student activities, Online Education, pan-European I&E education, Collaborative work, Team Dynamics, Challenge-based Education, Remote Learning