SME engagement for master programme design – ManagiDiTH
Best practices SME engagement for master programme design – ManagiDiTH Users: Training Providers (Public) | Theme: Skills Data | Action: Education Programmes/Courses | Beneficiaries: Training Providers (Public), Industry, SMEs ManagiDiTH managidith.eu Rosália Rodrigues, Whymob ManagiDiTH has brought together a multi-stakeholder consortium to develop a 1,5 year master’s programme for digital transformation in healthcare. The industry and academic expertise gathered from the respective partners allows the programme to equip professionals from healthcare, digital technologies, and management with the skills needed to plan and implement digital health services.Well-defining these skills is high-priority for the project. That said ManagiDiTH’s consortium offers a unique mix and thus a solid understanding of the needs and particularities of industry, and particularly SMEs. The challenge? ManagiDiTH has had to conduct a comprehensive ecosystem mapping and digital skills needs assessment to ensure the curriculum aligns with industry demands. This involves identifying key stakeholders across local and European healthcare and digital ecosystems, including healthcare institutions, technology providers, policymakers, and academic organisations. Additionally, an in-depth analysis of upcoming technological trends was necessary to understand the evolving landscape of digital health solutions. A key aspect of this challenge has been evaluating the current and future digital competencies required by healthcare professionals, ensuring that the programme equips graduates with the skills needed to lead digital transformation in the sector. Our solution ManagiDiTH integrated social skills training with specialised modules in data science and interoperability, ensuring graduates were equipped with both technical and interpersonal skills for digital healthcare transformation. It established a coherent curriculum with well-defined modules, clear learning outcomes and assessment methods. A dedicated digital learning platform was also implemented to enhance accessibility and engagement for students. Secured accreditation across multiple countries and institutions: The programme’s recognition and credibility within the European healthcare sector was ensured, which facilitated widespread adoption and long-term impact. Key takeaways Industry-Led Guest Lectures & Workshops: SMEs deliver guest lectures and workshops, providing students with real-world insights, case studies, and practical applications of digital healthcare solutions. Project-Based Learning with SME Collaboration: SMEs actively participate in designing and executing project-based learning modules, ensuring students gain hands-on experience in solving industry-specific challenges. Internships & Work Placements: Students have access to internships and work placements with SMEs, allowing them to apply their skills in professional environments Advisory Board Participation: SMEs contribute to advisory boards, ensuring continuous alignment of the curriculum with evolving industry needs, trends, and technological advancements. Collaborative Research & Innovation: SMEs engage in research initiatives, both locally and through multi-partner hybrid projects, allowing cross-sector knowledge exchange. Learn more here Case Summary– Context: Fit4internet is a non-profit initiative aimed at enhancing digital literacy across Austria. By using the Digital Competence Framework (DigComp AT), which identifies key components of digital competencies and aligns with European standards, Fit4internet helps individuals showcase their digital skills. The Fit4internet platform offers a way to track and prove digital competencies, helping with employability and ensuring that the Austrian workforce has the necessary ICT skills to meet market demands. Through the digital skills profile platform, the initiative supports both individual growth and the development of a digitally capable society. Challenge: The challenge faced is managing proof of competencies acquired through various learning methods, including formal education, non-formal training, and informal certifications, which can lead to inconsistent records. Securing sustainable funding to support the continuous development of new digital competencies, ensuring that programs remain up-to-date with evolving market needs. The second main challenge was fostering broad participation and engagement, especially among groups who may lack access to digital tools or education. Identified Approach / Solution: The Fit4internet platform provides a centralised, user-friendly system to manage and showcase digital competencies, aligning with the European Qualifications Framework (EQF). Through this platform, individuals can track and showcase their digital skills, making it easier for employers, educators, and organisations to assess their talent. The platform allows users to create an e-portfolio that showcases their digital skills, with the option to share it through a link or as a PDF. This portfolio highlights the digital competencies that a user has acquired, linked to their certificates. These certificates can be formal, non-formal, or informal. The platform also supports the generation of a digital skills profile that showcases the user’s acquired skills. Users earn digital badges as a visual representation of their skills. This allows them to continue with their learning journey, while showing off their competencies to others. Outcomes: Key takeaways: Fit4internet engage multiple stakeholders from academia, industry, and policy to develop holistic and relevant digital competency frameworks. They also use widely applied frameworks to measure skills gaps, enabling better planning for individuals and institutions. By doing this they improve reinsertion rates into the labor force by addressing individuals digital skill gaps and aligning them with market needs. This benefits companies by providing clear insights into the skillsets that are being developed and that are available in the workforce.
Incorporating automated tools and analysis in master’s programme design
Best practices Incorporating automated tools and analysis in master’s programme design Users: Training Providers (Public) | Theme: Skills Data | Action: Framework/Methodology | Beneficiaries: Training Providers (Public) MERIT digitalmerit.eu Simona Ramanauskaite, Full professor and senior researcher, Vilnius GediminasTechnical University MERIT is developing master’s degrees and short-term with the participation of NGOs, non-profits, research organisations, companies and SMEs. These are delivered by technical universities across Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Italy and Spain. Courses in domains such as AI, cybersecurity and IoT become quickly outdated and projects like MERIT need resilient methods for easily building new content. Establishing an intangible infrastructure which allows for this is key to the project’s sustainability. The challenge? MERIT had to strike a balance between specialisation and flexibility to ensure it meets both national market demands and student preferences. It should be adaptable to evolving industry needs while maintaining a structured curriculum that provides essential digital competencies. Designing courses based on arbitrary data and anecdotal knowledge would pose risks to the programme’s attractiveness and market match. Additionally, performing manual analysis of available data and indications for each new course would have been time consuming and inefficient. Questions that MERIT needed to answer include: How to monitor the market needs and existing innovations? How to assure the need for updates of existing courses? How to identify common topics for 5 study programmes with more than 15 courses? How to monitor students’ progress and identify potential issues in their development pathway? Our solution MERIT developed automated tools for systematic analysis and monitoring to enhance data-driven decision-making in education and workforce development. It minimised the resources required for data analysis by employing summarisation tools that aggregate and interpret large datasets, providing a clearer understanding of key insights. A competency-oriented tool was developed to monitor skill acquisition, track competency development, and predict future training needs. Outcomes 3x Faster mapping than before due to the automatic mapping tool and simplified syllabus 90% Tool accuracy for automated course similarity estimation 50+ Courses mapped simplifying the mapping between different study programmes Key takeaways Data scraping from multiple sources is essential: Leveraging data to collect real-time information on industry trends, skill demands, and educational programmes is an effective method to keep up to date with changing market demands and ongoing innovation. AI and NLP as tools to identify similarities, cluster data, and map trends across various educational programmes: allows for monitoring of necessary tweaks for existing courses. Implementing learning environment log data to identify potential study experience challenges is essential. This will allow you to access their root causes will enable proactive interventions. Learn more here Case Summary– Context: Fit4internet is a non-profit initiative aimed at enhancing digital literacy across Austria. By using the Digital Competence Framework (DigComp AT), which identifies key components of digital competencies and aligns with European standards, Fit4internet helps individuals showcase their digital skills. The Fit4internet platform offers a way to track and prove digital competencies, helping with employability and ensuring that the Austrian workforce has the necessary ICT skills to meet market demands. Through the digital skills profile platform, the initiative supports both individual growth and the development of a digitally capable society. Challenge: The challenge faced is managing proof of competencies acquired through various learning methods, including formal education, non-formal training, and informal certifications, which can lead to inconsistent records. Securing sustainable funding to support the continuous development of new digital competencies, ensuring that programs remain up-to-date with evolving market needs. The second main challenge was fostering broad participation and engagement, especially among groups who may lack access to digital tools or education. Identified Approach / Solution: The Fit4internet platform provides a centralised, user-friendly system to manage and showcase digital competencies, aligning with the European Qualifications Framework (EQF). Through this platform, individuals can track and showcase their digital skills, making it easier for employers, educators, and organisations to assess their talent. The platform allows users to create an e-portfolio that showcases their digital skills, with the option to share it through a link or as a PDF. This portfolio highlights the digital competencies that a user has acquired, linked to their certificates. These certificates can be formal, non-formal, or informal. The platform also supports the generation of a digital skills profile that showcases the user’s acquired skills. Users earn digital badges as a visual representation of their skills. This allows them to continue with their learning journey, while showing off their competencies to others. Outcomes: Key takeaways: Fit4internet engage multiple stakeholders from academia, industry, and policy to develop holistic and relevant digital competency frameworks. They also use widely applied frameworks to measure skills gaps, enabling better planning for individuals and institutions. By doing this they improve reinsertion rates into the labor force by addressing individuals digital skill gaps and aligning them with market needs. This benefits companies by providing clear insights into the skillsets that are being developed and that are available in the workforce.
Framework for competency-based evaluation of students in higher education
Best practices Framework for competency-based evaluation of students in higher education Users: Training Providers (Public) | Theme: Skills Data | Action: Education Programmes/Courses | Beneficiaries: Training Providers (Private), Training Providers (Public) MERIT digitalmerit.eu Simona Ramanauskaite, Full professor and senior researcher, Vilnius GediminasTechnical University Designing content in higher education is often associated with a lack of agility. Universities create fixed curricula, following rigid schedules, which do not match market dynamics, but rather limit their adaptability to rapidly evolving digital skills requirements MERIT has the task of creating an educational ecosystem, spanning across Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Italy and Spain to train digital specialists and improve the evaluation of different students or courses by matching study programmes to the skills produced. The challenge? MERIT was faced with a lack of standardised frameworks and common terminology for defining digital skill levels and competencies. This made it difficult to compare and analyse study programmes across different countries and institutions, hindering a reliable programme-skills mapping. Addressing these issues was essential to ensuring a structured and comparable approach to digital skills education. Our solution MERIT implemented a continuous and competency-oriented student and study programme analysis, which is not commonly applied in higher education. It established its own comprehensive framework for advanced digital skills and supporting competencies, which ensured a structured approach to skills evaluation and programme alignment. It implemented new training and assessment methodologies focused on competency development, covering both technical and soft skills relevant to industry needs. It developed tools for continuous analysis and monitoring of student progress and study programmes, based on a taxonomy of topics and their relationships. This facilitated the cross-country comparison and standardisation. Lastly, it created a structured mapping system that aligned educational programmes with key competency areas, ensuring that skill levels and topics are consistently classified across institutions. Outcomes 74 Topics and skillsforecastedfor research and academia 139 Technology Prioritiesidentifiedfor industry 12 University Prioritiesidentifiedin soft skills and knowledge areas Because of the data mapping, students can now be evaluated based on their competencies, and not based on courses that they have completed. Alumni are also encouraged to continue with life-long learning by receiving more structured directions on how to improve upon their competencies. Industry and alumni matching is available based on competencies / skills matching. Key takeaways Multi-Source Skills Analysis is Essential: The most effective evaluation method which combines multiple data sources, including SME needs, research trends, and summarised reports, to accurately assess hard and soft skills. Skills Mapping Should Align with Institutional Priorities: Competency frameworks should be adaptable to each partner university’s focus areas, ensuring alignment with local academic and industry requirements. Developing a Detailed Topic Hierarchy is Crucial: Establishing a well-structured and comprehensive skills taxonomy is key to ensuring comparability and adaptability in digital education programmes. Learn more here