Portfolio of innovative online courses in a pan-European network of Universities

A priority for higher education is to develop students’ technical as well as innovation and entrepreneurship skills so that they can make a successful transition from university to the workplace. Having this premise in mind, 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. Top European universities, researchers and leading businesses are in partnership with EIT Digital to provide cutting-edge ICT education in combination with innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) education, and to implement the I&E education, each partner university in the EIT Digital network implements an Innovation & Entrepreneurship (“I&E”) minor, composed of 4 courses / modules that each University has to implement. Unlike technical knowledge taught through in the technical courses courses, I&E skills though in the I&E minor can be used and to a broader range of jobs, disciplines, careers and circumstances, which makes them even more attractive to study how to implement suitably in distributed context. In a context where online education is more popular than ever, also EIT Digital decided to develop it’s I&E education based on blended learning, and in this blended strategy the teachers that belong to the community produce online contents for and on behalf of the entire community. The deployment of the blended strategy was with the aim to help even more to the cause of homogenizing the I&E Minor within and between the different Master’s programs at the Universities, and giving a common ground for understanding and interpretation of the various I&E concepts commonly presented at the different Universities. EIT Digital, building on the blended learning I&E initiative, and wanting to even more enhance the presence of topic of Digital transformation in the education curriculum, as well as to exploit in full potential the knowledge available in the network, started working on building the portfolio of online courses to be offered to all the students part of the EIT Digital network of universities. In this paper we will present the results from a survey for which courses can be part of our portfolio, new proposal for innovative courses we can offer in it, as well as strategies on how we plan to evaluate student satisfaction and oversee learning pathways and retention initiatives in order to understand if the approach is successful or not.