African BlendEd Course: novel pedagogies boosting employability and socio-economic prosperity

ongoing

Developing curricular activities involving students from different countries and disciplines, collaborating as a team to complete projects that generate relevant outputs to the local communities, improves students’ enthusiasm as well as core competences for the labour market such as teamwork, entrepreneurship, critical thinking and communication skills. The European universities in the partnership created and keep developing one such course unit since 2008 (BlendEd). The purpose of the ABC BlendEd project is to empower African universities in the area of Agriculture to setup and run such courses and to escalate the model to other areas in Africa. The objectives of the project are to foster student employability and generate added value to the local communities, stimulate the adoption of BlendEd courses by its key stakeholders, students, teachers, and beneficiary companies and promote multiplier effects to mainstream the adoption of BlendEd courses in Africa. The ABC BlendEd work plan is organized in three technical work units (Design, Implement and Mainstream) plus a project management unit. The Design unit is devoted to analysing the specific circumstances of the African higher education market and design a BlendEd course by adapting the model currently in use in Europe; it delivers the course syllabus and didactic materials. At the Implement unit we will run three pilot editions of the course. Implement is intertwined with Design in an iterative and incremental process to design, pilot, evaluate and adapt the BlendEd course during three academic years aiming to have it fine-tuned to the Africa reality. Mainstream focuses on dissemination and assuring sustainability. In three years, we expect to have an effective BlendEd course running and generating relevant outputs in the field of agriculture, 10 examples of sound results produced by the course and transferred to the local communities, an active Community of Practice developing the BlendEd paradigm in Africa.