UNITEL

The main purpose of the UNITEL project is to support modernisation, internationalisation and accessibility of the HE system within the partner country (Iran) through the development of innovative pedagogical approaches based on collaborative technology enhanced learning methodologies. The UNITEL project aims at tackling the challenges outlined in section D.1 by implementing a working methodology that allows the consortium to achieve two main specific objectives: empowerment of the engineering and STEM departments in Iranian universities in enhancing skills and competences of professors and instructional designers on innovative collaborative ICT-based practices as a means to increase curriculum modernisation and internationalization; modernisation of engineering and STEM curriculum through the development of flexible and accessible training path boosting new educational approaches based on technology enhanced learning and collaborative methodologies.

The project concrete results are:

a) baseline analysis: identifies details of the current practices and methodologies of HEIs in Engineering and STEM studies (pedagogical approaches and ICT-supported tools and systems)
e-course for faculty staff: defines the curriculum in terms of course objectives and learning outcomes and designs the online course focused on ICT-supported tools and systems applied to innovative pedagogical approaches composed of Learning Objects that will be developed jointly by partners based on their expertise;

b) piloting phase I: a total of 91 professors and instructional designers in PC HEIs will be trained using the online course delivered through an e-learning platform, which also enabled participants to share opinions, discuss issues among themselves and seek experts’ advice on various situations and challenges they were confronted with.

c) piloting phase II: trained faculty staff is to modernise its own course based on the acquired skills and knowledge. The modernised courses will be accredited within each PC HEI and delivered to a test group of students (at least 10 each course each HEI for a total of 700 students).