INGENIUM Innovation Strategy
The mission is to connect with European Higher Education, share knowledge and learn together.
To support this mission, the Innovation Committee works to involve students, acknowledge teachers, connect working life partners, and accelerate digitalisation in education.
The first of the four cornerstones of the strategy is Student-centered education. This cornerstone entails arranging practical and systematic means for students to be heard, involved, and engaged, assessing their needs, understanding their lives, and recognising different student profiles. Enabling flexibility and proceeding in studies will be accomplished by developing a wider variety of means to reach and learn the same relevant contents.
The second cornerstone is Excellent teaching. This necessitates defining and enabling excellent teaching and supporting and leading teachers for pedagogical renewal. Other strategic means include evaluating, recognising, and acknowledging excellent teaching, i.e., making it visible both locally and internationally. This cornerstone also includes sharing the best examples, practices, research, contents, materials, and methods and bringing teachers together for inter-disciplinary interaction, also from different language areas.
The third cornerstone is Co-operation and co-creation. This means building practical possibilities and intercultural means to connect teachers, students, and working life partners to increase working-life interaction and cooperation. Other vital measures include launching multicultural, multidisciplinary forums, think tanks, and panels for identified societal topics and publishing the forum results and panel discussions for later use in education and research.
The fourth cornerstone is AI and digitalisation in education. The first step here is realising that the use of AI in teaching is inevitable. It is critical to strengthen the AI and digital competences of the staff and the students and organise teams in which different professionals combine their pedagogic, digital, design, and other skills to generate innovative education. This gives us a chance to utilise both local and international networks as well as external expertise for AI and digital needs in education.
In addition to the four strategic cornerstones, some critical preconditions are identified: paying attention to the internal motivation of the teachers and the students for lifelong learning and engaging students to work more closely with their teachers and to have a higher impact on their education. It is also essential to strengthen social preconditions for innovative interaction by bringing students and staff together in networking venues and to concretise to students the usability of what they learn and how they learn to learn.
Innovative education also necessitates ensuring time, resources, and structures and introducing new and advanced methods, channels, and platforms for involving, engaging, sharing, innovating, educating, and learning. Iterative design thinking and design methods need to be utilised on the innovation path to understand the users, redefine challenges, innovate solutions, and test the prototypes in practice. It is also essential to develop metrics for the complex phenomenon of learning to learn and for innovative higher education (QA).
Innovation Strategy Workshop in Chieti-Pescara