Blended learning approach

The project educational mission is to educate specialists who will be able to make significant contributions to society throughout their career. The employment market in all sectors (and especially in ICT) requires an interdisciplinary approach from graduates. They need to be able to learn from other disciplines very quickly, understand its relation with ICT and business, and apply this knowledge in their collaboration and negotiation with their fellow experts, and, more importantly, with their counterparts in other disciplines and/or other sectors. Ideally, students should use online available support to make the most out of those co-operations; a typical situation that is reflected in blended learning.

Blended education is transversal to all the intersectoral and interdisciplinary learning. Blended learning is the combination of educational techniques to accelerate and improve education with the aim of more in-depth, personalized learning. It is more than the combination of face-to-face and online education; it is a wealth of new approaches that are possible by adding online techniques to traditional in-class teaching. It also allows to provide more direct feedback to the learner and the teacher. The teacher can follow progress of learners and monitor quality of the (newly developed) courses much easier.

Blended learning is also as a part of lifelong learning that successfully applied in teaching large groups of students and help to address a larger student cohort in a context of limited resources, proposes for more efficient forms of education relying on digital media. In this way the project blended approach offers an unique digital transformation where students can receive a variety of services in the field of education.

The C-Extended project offers students to apply new strategies, methods and tools of blended learning, using combinations of digital and face to face education.

The university-partners has extensive experience in running blended courses. For instance, UNITN hosts the dissemination task and helps all the universities in the EIT Digital network to ‘go blended’ for their own I&E minors. TU Eindhoven leads on the development and piloting of the framework for Blended Learning so that blended education is being applied in many courses at the TU/e. TU/e has stimulated blended learning as one of the means to realise core values of the TU/e vision on education such as small-scale learning experience and active learning.

Blended learning approach is designed also to support the Erasmus vision and instruments in taking a further step. In particular, blended contents, methods and tools can be reused and scaled up efficiently, fostering economies of scale and scope at the EU level and contributing towards a quality improvement of the educational material by linking it to an European context.