The Colibri project partners started out in 2014 to make an Erasmus+ strategic partnership project titled “Collaboration and Innovation for Better, Personalized and IT-Supported Teaching” (Colibri) (http://www.tuhh.de/colibri/home.html). The overall idea is to implement new and innovative teaching methods with students from different universities for needs and challenges faced in higher education in general and within the combination of the ICT domain and entrepreneurship in particular. Erasmus+ funds the Colibri project. A course is developed between seven universities, based on a variety of rich and digital content: Videos, quizzes, articles to read, assignments, etc. In addition to making it all available on online platforms, we are also experimenting with making it available offline as e-books. This has several advantages, e.g. it can be accessed offline, and it is not depending on platforms that can host it. Another interesting potential of e-books is that they can be generated to suit the needs of the individual learner.
TopThe Course
The course developed as part of the Colibri project is ideal for exploring the potentials in dynamic content due to the diversity of students, teaching staff and content.
The interdisciplinary joint grad course Future Internet Opportunities started spring 2015 with 30 students and was given by more than 10 different teachers from Alborg University in Denmark, Hamburg University of Technology in Germany, Riga Technical University in Latvia, University of Stavanger in Norway, University of Technology and Life Sciences in Bydgoszcz in Poland, Universitat Politechnika de Catalunya in Spain, and Bogazici University in Turkey. We also include the organisations National Documentation Centre in Greece, atene KOM GmbH in Germany, and Talaia Networks S.L. in Spain. These organisations both provide their own projects/ problems for the groups and they serve as providers of issues from other companies.
The students following the course represent the same universities; Erasmus+ is providing funding for four students per university per year, so a total of 28 students per year. Each year we had 1-2 additional students joining, which were then funded by or through their home universities. The students come with different technical backgrounds, i.e. telecommunications, computer engineering, bio informatics, entrepreneurship and business informatics, and at the same time they also represent different cultural backgrounds and learning traditions. First of all, this makes for very interesting projects and collaborations, but it is also a good living lab for testing the different teaching methods and receive feedback from such a diverse group of students.
The course has different parts (or phases) as seen in Figure 1. Parts 1 and 2 contain modules where the students study content. Parts 3 and 4 are where the students in groups utilise this content in Project Based Learning (PBL) projects with problems from real companies.
The course covers Internet technologies, the usage of Internet technologies, and business applications as entrepreneurship based on the Internet technologies. These topics are divided into 10 modules. In part 2 all students individually follow the introductory level of the 10 modules, then they choose 5 basic level modules, and at last they choose 2 advanced level modules. Then in part 3 and 4 they work in groups on solving a problem based project case (PBL) from a real company. At last the groups present and defend their understanding and proposal for the company case.
During the work with the company case the groups are expected to utilise the content provided in the 10 modules.
Figure 1. Flowchart of the Future Internet Opportunities grad course
The capital letters refer to the section on “Elements of blended learning in the course” below. “P”= “personalise”, “S”= “socialise”, “E” = “explore new pedagogical approaches”, and “C” = “collaborate”.Frick & Laudal, 2016. The course is based on blended learning in the sense that it consists of a combination of virtual and physical learning spaces: While most of the time is spent on virtual collaboration, there are also two seminars where all students and teachers get together: A 5-day workshop in part 3, where the modules are finalised and the project work started, and a 5-day workshop in part 5, where the projects are finished and presentations given and exams conducted.