PROJECT RESULTS

Design Of An Online Interactive Course On European Historical Landscapes

Leading Institution: University of Padova

In order to engage teaching staff in the project will develop an innovative educational resource with contents linked to the Humanities area. In particular, a “ready to use” online interactive course will be created using different formats of teaching material (videos, live, podcast, readings) and a range of assessment activities created also for the inclusion of disabled students. Teaching staff will be able to use this “ready to-use” resource in courses about Historic or Cultural Landscapes, Landscape Archaeology, Landscape Planning, Tourism and Landscape among many others. But the course will be constructed also with the possibility to be customized with different of further contents depending on the specific area of knowledge that the educator wants to develop.

To overcome one of the main difficulties in our project which regards the existence of very different teaching platforms in the Universities of the 4 countries involved, the course will be created inside a digital platform created specially for this project by DGVERY which allows the course to be easily and free visualised by all the partners through an URL address and therefore linked to any existing learning platform.

This output implies

1. design of the course and design and optimization of the different contents (interactive videos, texts, podcasts and exercises) in relation to most innovative developments related to online teaching and learning theory;

2. the development of instruments and technical aspects used in the course including facilities for disabled learners;

3. writing of contents;

4. transformation of visual material (photographs, drone recordings, remote sensing visualisations, 3d etc) into interactive videos and further didactic material;

5. Implementation of the platform.

The subject chosen for this course will be European Historical Landscapes, a multidisciplinary topic involving a wide range of teaching professionals including archaeologists, geographers, art historians and tourism sciences. The final target group able to use this course for teaching is very wide as well as the students which will be the final users of the course. We expect therefore that the course will have an important impact also because it will allow teaching staff to explore different possibilities of online and blended teaching, communicating and assessing the student’s level of understanding and degree of engagement with the learning system inside a precise subject related to their own area of knowledge. Although this important output will be discussed and developed by all the members of the partnership main responsibility will lay on the University of Padova team as this team has already produced didactic traditional material on the subjects of the course as well as innovative digital teaching material. The digital learning service at the University of Padova with large experience in the development of online teaching resources will guarantee the adequate theoretical support for constructing the course and its further implementation.