Towards blended learning implementation of innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) education within EIT Digital: the models and lessons learnt.

Part of the mission of EIT Digital (a Knowledge and Innovation Community from the EIT, European Institute of Innovation and Technology) is to train IT graduates at both Master’s and Doctorate levels, with strong innovation and entrepreneurial competences. Around 20 European top universities, renowned researchers and leading businesses are in partnership with EIT Digital to provide cutting-edge ICT education in combination with innovation and entrepreneurship training. To achieve the later one, each partner university in the network implements (from 2013) an “Innovation & Entrepreneurship” (“I&E”) minor, and this minor represents 30 ECTS (European Credits Transfer System) in a 120 ECTS 2-year Master’s program, that corresponds to 25% of the credits each student takes during the studies. This I&E minor is designed and deployed within such EIT Digital network of European universities through deep pedagogical cooperation. Such cooperation is notably enabled by the use of blended learning with online contents coproduced in the network. Taking that the aim is to have the biggest impact, and that there was no possibility to know beforehand which blended learning model among the various possible ones were the best suited for each of the universities and for cooperation within the network, the decision was to experiment and support various ones and like this help the Universities in their blending efforts. Depending on legacy of each university in regards to innovation and entrepreneurship education, and on their (human) resources in place, as well as the level of adoption of IT tools within their work processes, the needs for implementation / moving towards blended education varied for each university in the network. EIT Digital offered different models, varying from more to less loosely-coupled blending models, so that the choice made by each university should, by design, optimize the switching costs towards blended learning from the university point of view, yet satisfy the blending requirements from EIT Digital. The models we implemented for I&E education in EIT Digital are as follows: (1) flipped classroom, where online contents are delivered to students before class and then discussed in class, (2) blended online course, pre-packaged online contents with assessments that in most of the cases are associated with supervised sessions in class (3) online starter kit, set of online modules with assessments delivered prior to short-span events (such as summer schools for instance) (4) independent levelling-up, contents are delivered before class, accompanied with quizzes or assignments, not necessarily followed up in class, (5) online repository, online packages made available to cover students’ specific needs. In this paper we describe the models presented above in details, present series of examples from each of them, and reflect on the lessons learnt (from both teachers and students point of view) from the implementation.