Work programme

The project will be deployed in two districted phases, accompanied by a number of transversal activities.

During the first phase, the three approaches to identify new ways of using technology to support learning that compose the HoTEL innovation cycle will be explored.

WP1 Emerging TEL landscape will deal with emerging technology analysis and foresight, spotting what technologies are expected to emerge in the next ten years and how a possible learning use can be envisaged in the three learning contexts.

WP2 Theory looking for practice will “filter” learning theories through practices, analysing how original ways to use ICT may materialise learning theories that have not yet found real life validation.

WP3 Scouting grassroots innovators will analyse emerging technologies for learning starting from the grassroots, identifying, from TEL projects, the Lifelong Learning programme, national and international reviews, original practices in the use of ICT for learning and preparing to reproduce them in the exploratory environment in order to analyse, validate and generalise their results in view of large scale upscale. This WP will also identify grassroots innovators such as employers, professionals or trainers that are experimenting fundamentally new forms of learning in their own context: these will represent the embryos of the communities that will be activated in the second phase.

During the second phase, the project will work to explore original ways to use ICT in the field of learning in three main contexts: higher education, corporate training and individual, social networkbased professional development.

WP4 Learning Exploratorium plan to create three Learning Exploratorium Labs, that are leading edge innovative learning spaces, not mainly to validate TEL research but to adopt a fully holistic perspective on the manifold possibilities of ICT to support/enhance learning, mostly informal and nonformal one. The field of analysis will cover both generic ICT that are - among other uses - also used for learning and specific technologies and applications designed to support/enhance learning in one of the three contexts. The school education field is explicitly excluded from the present application because other projects are covering or expected to cover the “living school” field. This WP is aimed at discussing applicability, feasibility and scalability of the practices identified in WP2 and WP3 and of the trends and applications identified in WP1 and to define in details the “HoTEL Innovation Cycle”, in its constituencies, characteristics, processes, involved stakeholders, and expected outcomes.

Two transversal WPs will run for the whole project duration.

WP 5 – Targeted awareness building and multiplication will be dedicated to making sure that the results of the project experimentations and the proposed innovation cycle are disseminated to all the relevant stakeholders groups. A communication plan will be developed containing, based on the outcomes of the first phase of project development, the tools and services to be adopted to organise communication and awareness raising activities addressing (with a segmented approach): policy, industry, practice and the general public and media. Once the Learning Exploratorium Labs will be up and running, the three partners in charge of coordinating the Labs in the respective sectors (UNIR in the HE field, ELIG in the workplace learning area and EFQUEL in the professional development field) will lead a number of dissemination activities targeted to their sector stakeholders, guaranteeing a logic segmentation of the project public activities in terms of tools, language used and communication strategies.

WP6 – Project management and evaluation will run throughout the 24 months of project duration and will guarantee a smooth development of all the foreseen activities. In order to accompany the involved research, industry and policy actors, as well as relevant stakeholders in a flexible and adaptable way and to respond to new emerging needs, a specific set of activities of formative evaluation and design of new services will accompany the project lifecycle continuously starting from month 1.