The European Commission’s 2024 mid-point review of its strategy for high-quality, inclusive, and accessible digital education and training provides an important opportunity to evaluate the progress made and to refine the plan for the future. As part of this process, the Commission has called on organisations to submit position papers assessing the effectiveness of the Digital Education Action Plan and offering insights on how it can be improved for the next phase of implementation.
The Media & Learning Association took this opportunity to submit a position paper highlighting the role and importance of centres for teaching and learning and other support services in the European University sector and to put forward a number of recommendations. These recommendations are based on findings from the TransACTION! Erasmus+ project involving members of MLA aiming to support digital teaching and learning with media in a variety of different ways including the set-up of courses and training opportunities for staff.
This position paper begins with a description of the Media & Learning Association and its membership which currently includes 52 HEIs in 19 countries. These members are mostly represented through the HEI’s centre for teaching and learning, learning innovation centre, educational media production service, audiovisual support service or similar, referred to here as support providers. They are all directly involved and/or responsible for the promotion of digital innovation through the take-up of digital media in the teaching and learning activities of their HEI. They therefore play a pivotal role in fostering high performance digital education ecosystems within their own particular HEI due to their role in equipping academic teaching staff with the skills and tools to integrate educational media of various types into their teaching practice. However, the paper argues that these centres are generally under-represented in the decision-making process of their own HEI, lacking a voice at institutional decision-making level and are rarely invited to provide their expert input into the European digital innovation debate.
The paper puts forward the following recommendations:
- Senior staff from the support provider should be directly involved in the decision-making process of their own HEI to provide their contribution to the overall goals of the HEI when it comes to digital innovation.
- Support providers should be supported to carry out their own collaborative research into the most effective ways in which digital media can be used to support learning and to steer their findings directly into the policy discussion regarding best pedagogical use of media.
- Support providers should be allocated adequate resources to support the training, equipment and facilities requirements of academic teaching staff in creating their own high quality educational media resources on as regular a basis as possible.
- The training and professionalisation of educational media producers requires a more cohesive approach in terms of certification through the introduction of common certification and training standards at National and European level.
- Support planning needs to be as stable as possible, with established mid-and long-term plans in keeping with the overall innovation planning for the HEI.
- When choosing to adopt new and advanced formats such as those supporting immersive learning, the provider needs to have a sound strategy in place for the development and appropriate funding of such formats.
- Support providers should involve students as much as possible, not only in terms of the practical help they can provide but also to ensure that educational media is closely tied to student needs and expectations.
- While centralised support providers appear to offer the most effective option, it is important to ensure the shortest possible connection between the provider and academic teaching staff by effective networking and resource allocation with faculties.
- The structure of the support provider should operate in as interdisciplinary a manner as possible in keeping with the rapidly evolving educational media context.
- HEIs should promote as co-creative a process as possible when it comes to course creation, involving and respecting the different expertise available.
- Providers should be supported to consider the ethical and most efficient use of reliable AI tools to enhance the educational media production process and be given opportunities to share their results with other stakeholders in the wider European context.
- Support providers should play as significant a role as possible in supporting students become sufficiently literate in the effective use of different digital media-based tools and resources which needs to be reflected in the resources that they use and the learning opportunities with which they are faced.
