Frederick University at forefront of staff digital training

Frederick University is coordinating the digital transformation of higher education with the aim of training teaching staff in distance learning.

The university as the coordinator of the Open Lab for the up-skilling of higher educational staff in online management education, or OLMedu project, will develop an “open laboratory” and tools for the acquirement of digital skills in online education.

Funded by the Erasmus + programme of the European Union, the project is a joint venture between Frederick University (coordinator) and GrantXpert Consulting from Cyprus, the University of Patras and the Hellenic Open University from Greece and the University of Rome Tor Vergata in Italy. It is addressed to higher education institutions and academic staff who teach the fields of administration and management.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of digital transformation, and universities through their participation in such as OLMEdu can enhance and accelerate the transition to a digital future, starting with the digital transformation of education into management-related curricula,” said project coordinator and lecturer in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Informatics Engineering at Frederick University, Achilles Achilleos.

The OLMEdu project started in March 2021 and at the beginning of September 2021 the second meeting of the partners took place online.

In the near future, digital learning tools will be developed in coordination with the Mobile Device Laboratory (MDL) of the Department of Electrical, Computer and Informatics Engineering at Frederick University.

The project is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2023.

According to the OLMedu project’s official website, the project seeks to provide higher educational staff with the proper knowledge, skills, and competencies required to facilitate distance learning using technologies and tools of online training as well as cultivate their ability to embed the appropriate pedagogies, into the online environment, form their teaching-learning process using online methodologies, adjusted to the training context of management education.

Among the objectives are also the creation of training activities and learning material as well as the capacity for development of online simulations to integrate in training offering practice and the establishment of an open-access learning repository and online community of practice for the development of online training delivery skills and competencies for educational staff.