The lecturers at the Kaunas University of Technology are constantly searching for engaging didactic methods that would help to arrange their learning syllabus in an innovative way and also provide possibilities to use various techno-didactic approaches.
In order to apply various didactic innovations, a team of KTU members from the faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities with an international team of colleagues from different parts in Europe launched, the Erasmus strategic partnership programme funded project under the title “HACK-IT: Hackathon and Innovative Methodologies in Higher Education” in 2021.
The project is coordinated by the Polytechnic Institute of Braganza (Portugal) and unites scientists and researchers from the University of Granada (Spain) and the University of Applied Sciences Haga-Hellia (Finland).
The global forces that affect the world lead to rapid changes that are frequently uncertain, complex, ambiguous and impact many areas in human lives. Not only business, but also public institutions, public service providers, including educational institutions, and civil society need to adapt to them.
Facing everyday challenges
Today’s environment is one of the constant challenges for both the public sector and business. The demand for professionals who can work in this environment, who understand global changes in governance, who are capable of adapting to rapid and pervasive technological change, and who are also able to deal with large volumes of information and are responsive to the needs of a constantly changing society, is enormous.
Educational institutions, therefore, have a special responsibility to adapt teaching programmes to market needs and train professionals who are ready to work in the new environment. Lecturers must prepare and adapt themselves to meet the needs to educate society and develop new competences. They are required and have to disseminate the latest knowledge as well as continuously explore new learning methods or didactic approaches, making use of the opportunities and advantages offered by information technologies (IT).
It is also important to note that lecturers often have to show the initiative to continuously develop their qualification and upskill themselves and to find out the most effective and acceptable ways to do so, as not all institutions of higher education establishments provide them with the necessary financial or other resources. With that in mind, the network as “Community of Practice” (CoP) is developed with an aim to encourage and enable lecturers to share their experience, existing practices, co-create together, improve their teaching competences and interact with other colleagues around the world.
Similar communities of practice already exist in other European countries or institutions, such as the European Commission, but in Lithuania their possibilities and benefits are not utilized and there are hardly any active and vibrant Communities of practice functioning in Lithuania. Therefore, the Community of Practice, created as a joint effort by an international team from the Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities and KTU and members from other partner universities will be the first attempt to develop a continuously updated, vibrant and functioning Community of Practice at KTU and beyond its limits.
According to Jolanta Vaičiūnienė, the institutional coordinator of the project and the head of the Municipal Training Centre at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities at KTU, the aim of the HACK:IT project, within the scope of which the Community of Practice is being created, is to provide lecturers, teachers, and educators with the opportunity to implement and develop new activities, to train “hands -on-experience” competences and improve their didactic skills.
“The HACK:IT project aims to create a Community of practice that would bring together institutions of higher education in Europe to share the best and existing practices as well as knowledge about didactic innovations, challenges or other emerging possible learning and teaching issues, related to distance, face-to-face, blended and hybrid teaching”, emphasizes J. Vaičiūnienė.
According to her, CoP brings together groups of people who wish to share the up-to-date knowledge, information, experience or resources in specific subject areas.
“It must be mentioned, that first of all, the CoP is a community of people who are united by a desire to continuously improve, grow and develop. It is important to underline that the community of practice is united by the desire to share the latest knowledge, experience and best practices”, described the researcher.
In the discussion of aspects that bind this Community of Practice together, the project’s researcher, associate professor Dainora Maumevičienė at Kaunas University of Technology points out several areas.
“Flexibility and continuous involvement or willingness to participate and be a part of the community, the empowerment of the community (lecturers and participants), educational innovations and didactic solutions, shared by the members with each other, are among the most important reasons for the creation of such a Community of practice. Of course, the update and upskilling or the renewal of competences and the acquisition of new ones are also important. By sharing their experience, innovations, expertise, their developed content, syllabus or knowledge, the members of the community complement and enrich each other and, thus, learn from each other. After all, sharing what I have is one of the most important aspects of human nature”, she says.
According to the researcher, every member of the community of practice is not only a participant but also an active co-creator of the CoP, as they can share their experience and contribute in terms of ideas, syllabus and etc.
This can be some kind of the accumulated and shared knowledge about innovations that the person has tested or is about to try out, or presentation of certain challenges and lessons learned that participants can share. ” The CoP also embodies and reflects the idea of life long learning since communication, exchange of knowledge and the existing practices is that what leads to continuous improvement like a perpetum mobile”, she states.
Triggered by the current context
According to the researchers, the current situation and the constant encouragement or the urge of lecturers at higher educational institutions to adapt the learning process to a learner-oriented one is quite challenging for lecturers.
“During the pandemic period, we had to master a lot of technologies that are rapidly replacing one another. This has also revealed a growing lack of interpersonal competences, teamworking skills, or the increasing gap between learners and lecturers. Various technologies offer many opportunities, but at the same time pose many challenges in terms of empowering learners and teachers or engaging them more actively in the learning process”, shares J. Vaičiūnienė.
The researcher believes that lecturers are lost between different didactic solutions, innovations or information noise about tools, since the information about resources and activities is available on different pages and sources, or sometimes it is no longer available at all, because it was an output of a project that is non-available.
For all these reasons, the team of project developers and researchers at KTU that consists of the project lead Jolanta Vaičiūnienė, assoc. prof. Dainora Maumevičienė, prof. Saulė Petronienė and lecturer Vilma Sukackė proposed to the international project team to create and develop the Community of practice, and make it active, constantly growing and up-to-date during the implementation of the project and after its life-cycle.
The next step, which will be shared experience-wise by all participants and members of the developed CoP , will be an international virtual hackathon that will take place in April, 2024 during which nearly 100 participants in virtual teams at different European universities will try to tackle challenges during two days and then apply this in the learning and teaching process by means ofintegrating the hackathon, design thinking and challenge-based learning as three different didactic approaches. This will be an interesting challenge for all.
