O4 – Report of the impact of TUIs in e-learning: best practices and recommendations

TARGET

O4 will report the experience of this new pedagogical approach in the e-learning, including Tangible User Interfaces for home kits that allows a procedural and laboratory learning in an autonomous way.
For this reason, it is necessary to provide an easy manual for the stakeholders that intends to implement these activities. Thus, the potential targets could be divided in two areas with some sub-groups. One is related to the pedagogical strategy of implementing tangible and laboratorial activities with TUIs inside the MOOCs; one is related to the MOOC and the MERGO Odour Kit delivered for the wine sector:

• PEDAGOGICAL STRATEGY
  1. HEIs for implementing this methodology in other contexts 2) MOOC providers
  2. Researchers in the fields
• WINE SECTOR
  1. Other HEIs that intends to implement the MERGO MOOC in their enology courses
  2. HEIs and companies that could propose a spin-off of this MOOC
  3. Companies in the wine sector that aims to include this innovative MOOC for the training of their human resources
  4. Sommeliers, tasters and independent winemakers that wants to enrol in this course or activate it in their organizations.

IMPACT

O4 will be documented in a professionally designed handbook and translated to the partners’ languages, i.e. English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Croatian and Turkish. Aimed at a deep exploitation, O4 will be published under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA) license to encourage its free use, modification, and re-publishing during the project and beyond.
The nature of the O4 is intrinsically of a re-application and a future exploitation of the results achieved during the project activities. One impact will be the attainment of other sectors outside the wine sector, that could bring advantages from these innovative tools (i.e. touristic sector, creation of thematic paths in the local region, recovering of cultural traditions, etc.) Summarizing the expected impact will be:

• to understand educational issues, and to target solutions for the MERGO innovative methodologies.
• to analyse the pedagogical impact of the MERGO platform (MOOC+Odour Game) in conjunction with the Pilot implementation (A4).
• to collect the perspective of students, lecturers and professionals in the sector (the ‘teaching community’) that will be considered to make them innovators and aware practitioners, improving their digital skills.
• to define tailored solutions to students’ needs and interests thus favouring their active participation
• to propose the best practises and success stories, taking into account the presence of multiple stakeholders, as well as constraints, priorities, and challenges.

INNOVATION

The innovation will lay on the impact of the project in University courses, emphasizing the policy recommendations in order to apply the MERGO model and technologies.

AIMS

Briefly, the aims of the O4 are:

1. To analyse the concept of the project with students and professionals in wine sector, using a user centred methodology, analysing the effects on learning and acceptability
2. To use the MERGO platform in an online university course context, evaluating its impact
3. To define an International Certificate for the MERGO course
4. To deliver recommendations for future exploitation.
5. To organize three events: an International presentation of the MOOC (E6), a summer school on the course developed (E7), an annual international conference € on the potential of the technologies in teaching in wine sector with a gamified contest.

O4 will sum up key finding from the implementation activities (A4), by providing practical examples, tales from the field and success stories. On this basis, it will formulate a set of guidelines for HEIs and companies in the field and outside the wine sector on how to integrate in their formal and informal learning activities. Furthermore, it will draw recommendations for policy development across Europe and nationally, exploring an International certification.
Each Partner will produce, based on the Technical specification (O3.A1), at least 5 kits for its students, in order to evaluate the platform, using the budget item “Project management and Implementation”, each platform should cost about 200/250 €/kit, that is in line with the cost of the traditional publishing kit in the commerce. These 35 participants (5×7 Partners) will be assessed for the comprehension of the results of the platform. However, external users will have all information in order to gather the complete kit for their learning. (As previously claimed, the system is conceptualized in a modular way, so that the home-kit is not mandatory, but it highly increases the motivation and enriches the learning by a sensory approach).
The objective of O4 is to test, evaluate and validate the MERGO Platform and to support training of the students for wine tasting. O4 will focus on the methodological and the technological aspects of testing in operational and real contexts of the MERGO platform.