e-Leadership Trainer Accelerator

The skills required to achieve technological innovation are crucial in developing Europe’s competitiveness and innovative capacity. The modern economy depends on individuals with the ability to design new business models and to seize opportunities making best use of new technologies. High-tech talent is scarce and the number of vacancies for high-tech leaders or e-leaders is increasing drastically. Open Educational Resources (OER) and online learning have the potential to reduce the “time to market” for e-leadership education and training, allowing also for greater accessibility by different user segments, such as adults at work.The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the digital transformation of education that raised the major need to enhance the digital readiness of institutions and imposed some immediate responses to be given. On one hand, the crisis emphasised the potential of online teaching and learning, but it also revealed huge gaps in the delivery capacities of educational institutions as well as gaps in the capacity of individuals to actively participate and take up what is being offered. The e-Leadership Trainer Accelerator project (acronym eLead Speed) upskilled educators to improve their ability to exploit innovative teaching methods and design e-leadership curricula based on digital learning materials and tools, including OER, collaborative online learning and the e-CF. eLead Speed applied the e-leadership concept itself to speed up the spread of innovative educational practices on e-leadership in the era of the e-leaders – the digital era. The project built on the results of several EU initiatives and projects such as Le@d3.0 Academy knowledge alliance and the family of EU initiatives on e-leadership skills. The consortium was composed of three Bulgarian institutions, being respectively a HEI (NBU), an Excellence Centre for ICT industry competitiveness (ESI CEE) and the National Coalition for Digital Jobs in Bulgaria (DNA), plus two HEIs from Croatia (Algebra) and Germany (MUAS), a business school (ISTUD) and an SME specialised in digital learning (Gruppo Pragma) from Italy. As such, the partners represent both the Higher Education (NBU, MUAS and Algebra) and the tertiary Vocational Education and Training (ESI CEE, ISTUD and Gruppo Pragma) sectors. This ensured synergies between the different fields of education and training (HE and VET) and complemented expertise with the ultimate goal of upskilling educators, so they can better help learners to acquire e-leadership skills. The primary target group was educators from both HE and tertiary VET institutions teaching those technology and business related disciplines particularly included in e-leadership programmes (i.e. Strategic Management, Project Management, Digital Transformation, Technology & Innovation, etc.). The secondary target groups, which benefited indirectly were: HEIs and tertiary VET providers of e-leadership programmes, learners (both students and professional trainees) willing to acquire e-leadership skills, associations of educational institutions, businesses, their HR managers and in-company trainers and professional associations. The eLead Speed project provided a set of highly usable and directly applicable outputs. A set of 15 short e-leadership courses, modules or course outlines and other practical and reusable resources (IO5) were developed by the educators based on the e-Leadership Observatory data (IO1) and the e-Leadership Competences Framework (IO2) and facilitated by the Community of Practice (IO3) and the Trainers’ Toolkit: How to Design, Deliver and Evaluate e-Leadership Curricula (IO4). The trainers worked collaboratively online to design the teaching materials making use of OER and e-tivities. The courses are stored and rendered available inside the OER repository (IO3) for free use by all trainers who are registered to the Community. The implemented methodology covered the entire cycle from industry requirements through occupational profiles to innovative educational content that provides relevant skills and competences and this way creates new opportunities for the industry but also creates new industry requirements for new training and courses. It followed the principles of incremental development and continuous improvement. The selected transdisciplinary, holistic approach guaranteed transferability and scalability of the results and secured high levels of sustainability. The areas of impact of eLead Speed can be summed up as: • Increased knowledge on e-leadership skill needs and occupational profiles • Increased availability of OER and content for e-leadership teaching • Increased capacity of educators to develop training programmes in consistency with market needs and occupational standards • Increased skills of educators to use and develop open learning materials and digital tools • Increased access to e-leadership education and training • Improved quality and relevance of education.