Needs analysis: The COVID-19 pandemic shows that some universities have already established courses in distance and hybrid models in regions with proper infrastructures while some others suffer from lack of staff, infrastructure, and readiness. Therefore, European collaboration is much needed than ever. In order to foster the institutional collaboration, practice and resources exchange, many government facilities and independent institutions launched collaborations and calls for response to COVID-19, including this very much exceptional Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership call. We see this as an opportunity to establish international and national collaboration at individual level where two or more higher education lecturers can benefit from each other’s experience and design (or re-design their existing F2F lectures) a curricula with complimentary materials of which already exist or created by themselves. These gaps between the countries should be considered along with the fact that reforms for the Bologna Process to make higher education more inclusive and accessible in Europe are performed unevenly across the 48 partnering countries (according to The Bologna Process and the European Higher Education Area page of European Commission). Therefore, in the time of pandemic, we need enhanced virtual mobility, credit recognition, and ECTS equivalent. The collaborative curriculum design platform in IO4 aims at establishing a virtual transnational cooperation in higher education to strengthen the quality and relevance of teaching online/hybrid.

Target groups: HE instructors; anyone who is creating curricula for online

Elements of innovation: As it is presented in the need analysis, there are many supportive tools for higher education lecturers to use in the content preparation of the lecture. Our innovative digital hub, however, provides opportunities for i) national and international collaboration and ii) support for both curriculum and content design not only complimentary tools and OER recommendation.

Expected impact and transferability potential: We expect that active use of this functionality would be lower than the participation in forums and MOOCs. Nevertheless, we expect at least 30 higher education lecturers per country would use the platform for collaborative curriculum design. Even though we offer this function for higher education lecturers in particular, we believe any lecturer who needs to prepare an online/hybrid course can benefit from the collaborative environment.

How: We aim to create a platform which will enable lecturers to collaboratively create curriculum and lectures. They will be able to host relevant OERs and tools from the platform created in IO3 and the collection of our partners such as VideoLectures.Net, X5GON, SlideWiki and EdShare. Moreover, search among OERs will be provided through the X5GON Discovery functionality which was developed with the Horizon 2020 X5GON project where JSI is one of the consortium members. The users will be guided with tips and evaluation sheets created based on IO2. Also, lecturers will be able to upload their filmed lectures on VideoLectures.Net and automatic transcription and translation to enhance the accessibility of the content will be provided. Currently, the translation service of VLN automatically translates the video among the languages Catalan, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Slovene, and Spanish. Any OERs created for the lectures will be stored in EdShare and SlideWiki. The uploaded content will be subjected to a creative commons license where everyone can freely access.

Steps:

IO4.1 Desk research on the existing collaborative platforms, including the up-to-date results from ongoing Erasmus+ project through the tools provided by European CouncilI

O4.2 Design the functionalities based on the framework and guidelines developed in IO2.

IO4.3 Implementation of the designed platform IO4.4 Integrating search and recommendations of OERs services already exist in the partners and the resource pack created in IO3.

IO4.5 Improvements and fix

Partners involvement: The IO will be led by Octaedro Publishing. Octaedro, who will be responsible for implementing the design of the platform, and host it. BEU will lead the design of the platform and other related tasks in the project along with the other higher education institutions. WE will contribute to the design of the platform.