The events of the last year have revised the digital competences of educational staff, including universities, and have shown significant deficiencies in these competences. The need for online and distance learning combined with standard academic activities has created a huge challenge for universities. The lack of teaching materials adapted to distance education in recent months has caused fatigue and boredom among students and frustration among lecturers. Research - conversations conducted at partner universities with academic teachers showed an urgent need to improve digital competences, learn how to create new e-teaching materials or update existing ones and adapt them to remote work. This includes materials for students, syllabuses, scripts, multimedia materials and tips for those conducting classes using new methods. The development strategy of the university, including the coordinating institution, assumes the development of digitization and distance education. A research area called DigiWorld was created. Training in the use of educational platforms is conducted in all partnership institutions. However, these trainings are not sufficient. They provide general and theoretical knowledge (difficult to acquire for some people), but do not develop the ability to implement it in everyday academic practice.
Partner institutions - lecturers and students (conversations and mini-interviews from the first days of October 2020) confirmed that there is a lack of electronic/digital teaching materials for individual courses, and sending students scanned PDFs of thematic books does not facilitate online studying. The applicant university plans to develop and implement a new module of studies in the specialty "Expert in security policy and cooperation in the Mediterranean basin".
In the development and implementation of the project results, international cooperation is necessary, using good practices and proven teaching methods in the partnership institutions in order to adapt and digitize the teaching process to the requirements of online education. The added value will be a common syllabus for the new educational module on security in the Mediterranean, together with its digital form of teaching for selected courses, as well as (after adaptation to local conditions) implementation of this module in the everyday work of the partnership's universities.
