Project Description
The LightCode Erasmus+ Project aims to make higher education more inclusive, shaping opportunities for all students to develop competitive advantages in digital skills. It focuses on the priority of digital transformation in higher education, in particular for areas where not enough attention is paid to digital skills development.
The vision of the LightCode project is to offer and implement educational material using low-code techniques at cross-sectoral level. The project is based on the development of inter-connected higher education systems, as it aims to develop digital skills for all students, regardless of their field of study, in order to make use of their knowledge and expertise in the respective scientific field by exploiting the potential of low-code.
Through our project, we will strive to increase the capacity and readiness of higher education to keep pace with technological developments and market trends. This way, LightCode will manage an effective and innovative shift towards the enhancement of digital skills in every student, regardless of the scientific sector. Such a transition will not only bring benefits to students, but will also benefit faculty members with the opportunity to apply modern digital pedagogical methods and to develop and improve their expertise in the use of digital tools.
Hence, the LightCode project promotes the development of flexible career paths for all students and creates opportunities for those studying various fields to be more competitive and develop skills in line with the intensive development of technology. Simultaneously, the project promotes gender equality, as it is common for most technology courses to be chosen by male students. The application of pedagogical methods to develop digital skills in most of the university studies, we can create an environment in which all students have digital skills. In consequence, the LightCode project aims to promote gender balance in jobs requiring digital and development skills, enhancing also general employability and students’ opportunities in their professional and social lives.
The LightCode project aims to train faculty members in interdisciplinary approaches and innovative teaching methods and practices, including low-code teaching materials and platforms, forming a more open and innovative higher education system.
The LightCode project approach will promote a student-centered curriculum that is in line with current market needs and technological trends. In this way, skills mismatches can be reduced and students’ learning needs will be more easily met, while the university teaching profession will follow the demanding trends of today’s highly digitalised world.
Specific objectives of the LightCode project:
- To identify the current needs in line with the requirements of the post-covid era, in order to strengthen higher education to provide students of all disciplines with digital skills and tools. To achieve this, detailed research will be carried out to address the existing gaps in the development and usage of digital tools in higher education, as well as at business level.
- To build confidence and empower faculty members to teach digital skills, via offering a training program for them in order to apply low-code training material more easily, while simultaneously further advancing their professional development towards new technology trends and labor needs.
- To develop an extended range of digital skills for students in order to enable them to apply the knowledge and expertise of the discipline they have studied in the digital environment by developing digital applications and tools. To achieve this, an innovative student-centred curriculum will be developed, which will allow students to exploit the potential of low-level code, without the need for prior knowledge of code development.
- To offer an interactive low-code platform at no cost, that will make application development an easy process. Students will create their own projects and applications through the LightCode platform and will have the opportunity to test more and more of their ideas through our free and open-source tool. This is a great advantage for the platform users, as all such low-code platforms currently available are paid, with monthly subscriptions of demanding amounts.
Project Management
Qualitative assessment and monitoring approach based on predefined milestones and performance indicators.
LightCode Manifesto
Survey for exploring the level of information and knowledge about the potential of the low-code approach.
Teachers Training Programme
Training program and development of materials for university members on the use of the low-code approach.
LightCode Course
Undergraduate course including both introductory material and an in-depth understanding of how the low-code approach works.
LightCode Platform
Creation of an environment that enables the development of complete applications visually through modeling and a drag-and-drop interface.
Dissemination
Report and promotion of the results of all the project work packages by means of a multi-dimensional strategy.