The PLACEDU Project Consortium has launched the project’s Meta Platform, a distance learning area that covers both the distance learning tools currently used by Higher Education (HE) and new ones.
At present, teachers often feel lost and experience anxiety about how to make the switch to e-learning. Thus this platform, along with our training course for teachers, gathers all different knowledge on e-learning and how it can be enhanced to avoid losing students’ motivation, social skills, communication, and hands-on experience.
The Digital Social Place focuses on the tools that enable next-level online education independently from the COVID-19 recovery. This means that the focus of the metaplatform shifts away from the extremities experienced by HEIs, while at the same time enabling them to rethink their teaching delivery after the pandemic. The platform creates a new narrative of how e-learning can be enhanced (i.e. promoting interaction between online students, utilising blended learning environments, monitoring the students for signs of social isolation, peer-to-peer activities, etc.).
Project coordinator Žemartas Budrys stated: “The Meta Platform is a living organism that has different tools, methods, trainings that are not necessarily created by our team but also by other stakeholders, who are sharing their best practices. Hence, this expands the content and provides a more comprehensive overview of e-learning pros and cons.”
KMOP’s Unit of Education Coordinator, Eirianna Dragona mentioned the need to develop not just another platform, but an environment that encompasses distant learning tools and resources of past, present, and future in order to lay solid groundwork for the sustainability and development of distance learning over time.
The PLACEDU Digital Social Place can be found here.
The PLACEDU project is implemented by 7 partners from 6 countries: Lithuania (XWHY and Vilnius University), Slovenia (University of Ljubljana), Cyprus (CSI), Belgium (OTB International), Iceland (University of Iceland), and Greece (KMOP Education & Innovation Hub).
The project is co-financed by the Erasmus+ KA2 Programme of the European Commission.