Engineering Literacy Online – Teachers as Medium for Change Erasmus Project

Project Title

Engineering Literacy Online – Teachers as Medium for Change

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Natural sciences

Project Summary

Serious shortages of highly-skilled and qualified professionals for engineering jobs are hampering Europe’s sustainable growth objectives. Europe is mainly confronted with qualitative shortages on the labour markets, linked to specific regions, skills or occupations.
To improve the current situation on the European labour market ELIC seeks to make a change on engineering literacy among secondary natural sciences teachers. Therefore, it supports an increases the number of qualified professionals with specific technical job-specific skills in the future due to higher involvement of pupils on engineering topics already from secondary school level on. Further, ELIC supports in the achievement of Europe´s five sustainable growth objectives and the international competitiveness of European engineering companies. This project aims to ensure the availability of the right skills – and supports thereby a major concern of the European Commission and the Parliament (Strategy 2020 – Agenda for new skills and jobs).

ELIC is represented by 8 partners from 4 different European countries (AT, CZ, DE, IT) each facing the need to increase highly skilled engineering employees in the future. The consortium is represented by technical universities, training providers, social development agencies and by secondary schools and combined with the associated partners (school authorities, counselling providers) the partnership is very powerful in terms of expertise and international network which supported ELIC in its implementation.
The ELIC project identified secondary natural sciences teachers as the primary target group and aimed to educate them on engineering literacy and technical didactics. This leads to the following advantages: secondary natural sciences school teachers can update their skills on these two topics which is an identified need of the target group and second, the primary target group can act as multipliers to pupils to increase their interest on engineering.

The main output of the ELIC project is a highly innovative massive open online course (MOOC) for secondary natural sciences teachers in order to increase their competences and skills on technical didactics and engineering literacy (www.elic-mooc.com).
The basis for the MOOC was an intensive analysis on training needs and a GAP analysis, followed by the development of a skill card and a detailed training curriculum for the MOOC. The MOOC was implemented in the four participating partner countries to make a difference in teachers´ education and to foster engineering skills in secondary schools. The ELIC MOOC was taking place for six weeks (~30 hours in total) and covers topics such as basics of engineering, current trends in automotive engineering and hot topics in engineering and how to implement technical cases on the basis of practical examples. In total, 120 participants coming from secondary school, university and pupils from 6 countries registered to the MOOC and jointly learned on the platform to increase their engineering literacy skills, which enables the teachers to include more technical aspects in their classes. The ELIC Toolbox further provides examples on how to use MOOC material in classroom.
Further, as the knowledge on engineering and technical didactics among secondary school teachers is not only lacking in the project countries, the ELIC consortium developed a Transferability & Evaluation Handbook which on the one hand describes the evaluation process of the MOOC and on the other hand gives advice and instructions on how to multiply and repeat the trainings in other countries and/or by other institutions, taking into consideration the outcomes of the MOOC evaluation on several levels. Therefore, the ELIC project aimed to ensure sustainability of the outputs created which can be reached through the transfer of the ELIC concept to other countries in need.

With the dissemination efforts taken by the whole consortium on an international basis, ELIC can definitely make a difference in terms of the engineering literacy of secondary school teachers on a short-term basis. Furthermore, the availability of highly skilled engineering employees, the interest among pupils on engineering topics as well as the number of engineering university graduates will increase like a spiral in the future in the long-run.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 224193,32 Eur

Project Coordinator

FH JOANNEUM GESELLSCHAFT MBH & Country: AT

Project Partners

• Pascal-Gymnasium Grevenbroich
• HOCHSCHULE DUSSELDORF
• CRAMARS SOCIETA COOPERATIVA SOCIALE
• Bundesrealgymnasium Kepler, Graz
• INTERNATIONAL SOFTWARE-EXPERTS FORCOLLABORATIVE NETWORKS I.S.C.N. GESMBH
• VYSOKA SKOLA BANSKA – TECHNICKA UNIVERZITA OSTRAVA
• ISIS FERMO SOLARI