Fine-tuning tools & new work methodologies at DT Seminar

From 25th to 28th October 2022 the Design Thinking Seminar and Transnational Meeting of Key Action 2 project PRODIGE – PROmote DIGitalisation for Education & training took place in Bologna.

All project partners participated: SEPR (France), EU-Geschäftsstelle Köln (Germany), Institut Esteve Terradas i Illa (Spain), LUKSIA (Finland), MFR du Bergeracois (France), and Scuola Centrale Formazione (Italy), who co-hosted the event together with UNISER.

More specifically, each organisation invited two or more teachers from their institution to take part in the Design Thinking activities, which took place on the 25th, the 26th and the morning of 27th October. The afternoon of the same day and the day after, the 28th October, was dedicated to the Transnational Meeting of the project, where coordinators could discuss more internal issues, such as finance and administration.

Design Thinking Seminar

On the first day, Sara Ciet, Chief Design Officer at Uniser officially opened the event, followed by Cécile Aillerie from SEPR, project coordinator, who presented the project and the aim of the Seminar to all participants.

After these introductory sessions, all partners set off to discover Bologna with an interactive activity introduced by Uniser hosting coordinator Mathilde Costes. Divided in 2 teams, they followed an online map to discover a few secrets of the city, getting to know the main attractions and even learning how to order a coffee in Italian!

The activity was followed by a debrief moment and a visit to Sette Chiese in Piazza Santo Stefano. Once back at the office, Paola Saini, Partnership Team Leader at Uniser held a Fears & Expectations workshop, to let participants reflect on the experience and understand their objectives for this event.

After a pizza lunch, the work on the intellectual outputs of the project started, and specifically on intellectual output n. 3. Urko Barrueta Sangines from SEPR presented IO3, which is an online training course for teachers on internationalisation at home, explaining  the work done by partners up to that moment.

Later on all participants were divided in groups to analyse different sections of the online course, discuss them and provide their feedback, which was then presented by each group facilitator  to all other groups in a closing session.

Day 2 was hosted at FOMAL, one of the VET centres in the network of project partner Scuola Centrale Formazione. For this reason, it was Rita Festi from SCF that welcomed participants on this day.

She was followed by Irene Lucisano, teacher at FOMAL, who presented the school and led a visit to the classes and workshops.

After the visit, Francesca Drago from SCF presented the intellectual output n. 1 of PRODIGE project, an online toolkit for managing learning mobility going digital, as well as the work done by the partners since the beginning of the project. To assess it, participants were divided in 4 groups, facilitated by partners who proposed the tools: they first presented the tool, then explained how it should be used and collected feedback from all group members with a simplified SWOT analysis proposed by SCF. Finally, each group’s main outcome was discussed in a plenary session.

The lunch was prepared and served by FOMAL students who are getting training in the hospitality and catering sectors.

After lunch, the works on intellectual output n. 2 started, presented by Lucia Amadori from UNISER. IO2 is a digital platform for a community of families supporting the internationalisation of VET schools called Hoster, which was conceived by UNISER and improved thanks to PRODIGE. In order to analyse how it could be further improved, 2 activities were organised in this regard. The first was an interview with a few families that already hosted international students and that were willing to give their testimonies.

The second activity aimed at mapping the whole hosting process (of which the platform is one step) thanks to the agile and lean methodology , more specifically with a workshop called “Event storming”, which was organised by an external facilitator, Filippo Gianessi.