Diverse policies at the European level are promoting initiatives to foster community engagement in higher education. This is due to the fact that cooperation between communities and higher education institutions (HEIs) generates a wide range of cultural, economic and social impacts. Recently, the COVID-19 crisis forced evidenced the need for improving community engagement activities while using digital channels.
As a response to this challenge, it emerged the DICE Project: Digital Community Engagement Accelerator for Student Learning and Socio-economic Impact. The project aims at developing a scalable acceleration program to advance the design and implementation of digital Community Engagement courses for university educators and programme directors. The project will gather the latest knowledge on support for advancing community engagement initiatives, build an acceleration program, and pilot the accelerator in HEIs. The result will be a tool that will dissect the complex challenge of digitalising community engagement into smaller parts and translate it into enhanced student learning and social impact.
Developing digital tools to support and accelerate initiative in community engagement, enhancing the strategies for community engagement in HEIs, and reinventing how community engagement is planned at the course, faculty or institutional level are some challenges the project will build upon.
This project lies its foundations on references such as “Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy” (Wingo, Heppler & Schadewald, 2020); “Community engagement in higher education: trends, practices and policies” (Farnell, 2020): and “Building Technology With, Not for Communities: An Engagement Guide for Civic Tech” (McCann, 2015). These references give shape to the concepts the project will further develop.
University-community engagement will benefit from the positive outcomes of digitalization in ways such as:
- Universities will be able to broaden their geographical scope (e.g. European universities supporting social projects in Africa and local and regional projects),
- it will allow students to better engage with stakeholders that were not reachable before or where physical distance should be kept (i.e. disabled population or people with infectious diseases),
- it can enable to connect community work with internationalization efforts (i.e. intercultural community projects with university students from various countries).
Digitalizing community engagement, however, is not an easy task. University educators and course directors are usually overwhelmed by the challenge of designing and implementing this new form of engagement for several reasons:
- there are not many tools to support digital community engagement,
- there are no defined processes to follow,
- there is a lack of guidance and motivation to build their own digital CE course,
- there is a need to develop a step-by-step program that guides university educators and course directors through the process of designing community engagement courses in the digital space.
On the last 1st and 2nd of December 2022, the project consortium met in Kosice (Slovakia) to kick-oo the project. For the next three years, the Technical University of Kosice (Slovakia), Helixconnect (Romania), Università Telematica degli Studi (Italy), University of Alcalá (Spain), and the Accreditation Council for Entrepreneurial and Engaged Universities (Germany) will work together developing the Digital Community Engagement Accelerator for Student Learning and Socio-economic Impact (DICE).
By Hugo Buitrago
