OnCreate Erasmus Project

Project Title

OnCreate

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 higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Open and distance learning; Creativity and culture

Project Summary

Study programmes following blended-learning or even pure online approaches are becoming increasingly popular in higher education. Two main drivers for this development are increasing international cooperations among universities and with industry partners and the special requirements of students in continuing education programmes. But even regular courses use online platforms to establish a permanent point of exchange beyond the weekly course meetings. Yet in a time, where the use of eLearning platforms, Google Drive and Skype feels commonplace, the abundance of available tools conceals the scarcity of processual knowledge to use them, especially compared to the richness of methods we use to apply in physical teaching and collaboration.

The OnCreate partnership is about the exchange, implementation and evaluation of processual and contextual knowledge of online collaborative courses with focus on creation and innovation. By the term “Creative Online Collaboration Processes” we refer to all such activities which aim to solve in a group problems that do not have standard solutions, mediated through web-based tools. Typically, such problems require interdisciplinary, lateral thinking, social empathy and extensive ideation with the aim of mutual inspiration. The processes applied are often nonlinear and rely on multimodal means of synchronous and asynchronous communication, with a special focus on visual tools.

The project was organized around the four main objectives:

RESEARCH – about the state-of-art of creative online collaboration inside and outside the consortium

CREATE – and implement transnational online courses

EVALUATE – online and blended courses for their affordance and support for creative collaboration

GENERALIZE – our insights to make them accessible to the public

The consortium created twenty courses addressing different creative challenges from design to TV development to innovation management. Most of which are suitable to be re-implemented based on the course blueprints available on the project website. Furthermore, the project created a set of seven evaluation packages to enable teachers to evaluate their courses and online course environments with regard to how much they afford creative collaboration. Along came a number of useful teaching methods to structure synchronous and asynchronous activities online. Finally, we gave general recommendations for running online courses on social media platforms, project management apps and learning management systems.

The project has attracted four university partners outside the consortium and three industry partners, who have been collaborating actively at least in one course or research activity. Two multiplier Events at Magdeburg, Germany and Lincoln, UK disseminated the project results to a wider audience of practitioners and academics in the fields of media design and digital journalism.

Six partners from among the consortium and associated partners are already committed to run at least one common course annually based on the blueprint of the most successful courses. At the same time, the project sparked the idea of a “blended student exchange”, which comprises online collaborative courses with the partner university the semester before students actually go abroad. This will be the focus of further Erasmus+ activities within the consortium.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 447353 Eur

Project Coordinator

HOCHSCHULE MAGDEBURG-STENDAL & Country: DE

Project Partners

• TAMPEREEN AMMATTIKORKEAKOULU OY
• UNIVERSITY OF LINCOLN
• TAMPEREEN YLIOPISTO
• UNIVERZA V LJUBLJANI
• AALBORG UNIVERSITET
• LAPIN AMMATTIKORKEAKOULU OY
• FACHHOCHSCHULE POTSDAM