The digital transition is one of the most far-reaching changes of the 21st century. It involves not only big advances in technology, but is deeply and pervasively changing societal institutions, political structures, economies and cultures, fundamentally impacting how we work, how we interact and even how we think. The European Union aims at a digital transformation to accelerate Europe’s economy and shape Europe’s society in the Digital Decade. As the European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade, signed 15 December 2022, sets out, the EU aims to build a just and democratic digital society, protecting and respecting democracy and human rights, putting people at the center of social and technical innovation, and promoting human values shared across Europe and beyond1. To achieve this ambition of the Digital Europe Programme, a high-performing Digital European Social Educational Innovation Ecosystem is needed – in which academics, universities, research institutes, societal institutions and businesses work together. These new ecosystem partnerships drive innovation guided by human values and principles, enhance education and research, and will appeal to and attract the best possible staff and students. This is the overall vision and ambition of our EURIDICE project.
Despite the clear opportunities the digital transition offers for economy, labour market, and for addressing big societal challenges (cf. the SDGs), there are also concerns to address. European citizens and businesses still, for over 80%, depend on digital products, services, infrastructures and intellectual property from other continents and regions2. Moreover, digital inclusion in Europe is far from achieved: for many people the digital world is still inaccessible and/or unaffordable. Digital technologies are shaped by implicit and explicit choices, incorporating values, norms and economic interests. As a result of pre-existing cultural, social and institutional preconceptions, bias can enter algorithmic systems, resulting in systematic unfair treatment and even discrimination, in other words, unwanted digital futures.
Accordingly, to ensure fairness and inclusion in the digital transition and to overcome the Digital Divide, Europe needs, and EURIDICE aims to educate and build, all-round digitally skilled social digital innovators – intensively trained to understand the nexus of society and technology, equipped with advanced digital skills and social reflexivity, and thus capable of driving human-centred innovation in inclusive and responsible ways in a rapidly changing society.
Scope of project: Interdisciplinary Education on Advanced Digital Skills for Social Innovation
EURIDICE stands for EURopean Inclusive Education for Digital Society, Social Innovation, and Global CitizEnship. Its overall objective is to educate and build in an interdisciplinary way the coming generation of social innovators with advanced digital technologies, with an emphasis on the highly societally influential sectors of Education, Communication and Culture.
Educational Aim. Our educational aim is to nurture people, social innovators and reflective practitioners (Schön), with Digital Thought Leadership, in other words, with the all-round interdisciplinary vision, insight, and capabilities to:
• Imagine and shape Digital Society futures through education, communication and culture, in ways informed by human values shared in Europe and beyond;
• Address outstanding and emerging digital social, educational and cultural challenges in innovative ways;
• Perform associated public communicative functions and services that deepen digital understanding, reflection, participation by the general public and society-at-large. The graduates of the EURIDICE educational programmes will be highly interdisciplinary skilled and qualified to take up higher professional, governance, management, policy and leadership positions.
Educational Programs. To this end, EURIDICE delivers three closely related educational programmes, with as target groups: European master students (120 ECTS EU Joint Master Degree programme), academic teachers (digital teaching staff Capacity Building programme), and working professionals in the sector (Life-Long Learning modular programme). The education is digital challenge based and as a consequence transdisciplinary. Students follow a hands-on track of advanced digital technology and engineering (esp. AI, ML, Data Science, Cybersecurity), tailored to students with a non-ICT background.
Associated sociotechnical issues and challenges (e.g., the trustworthiness of AI applications) are then highlighted and analyzed from other disciplines’ perspectives. So apart from technical engineering skills, disciplines come into play in the interdisciplinary curriculum such as law (EU digital law and regulation), humanities (ethics of AI/ML; digital culture, diversity, and inclusion), social science (communication; social media and network effects), and business/economics (e.g., platform business models and fair digital ecosystems). Below a full overview of courses is given (Sec. 2.1, Table 1). Across the consortium different disciplinary departments participate (witness the list of participating experts in Sec. 2.3 below), so EURIDICE has all needed academic field expertise in house.
EURIDICE is able to deliver due to an extremely strong consortium with 11 research-intensive universities across Europe, 2 independent digital research centers of excellence, 6 SMEs, and 4 associated HEI partners esp. from the Global South. The HEIs in the consortium originate from the EU-supported Aurora EUN (8 HEI partners), expanded in terms of expertise and geographical coverage. Accordingly, the consortium enjoys an excellent geographical distribution over Europe: North/West (Iceland, Netherlands, Denmark, Germany), South (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Romania) and East (Czechia, Slovakia, Ukraine), providing ample opportunities for outreach and scaling up digital expert education across and even beyond Europe. It is noted that the HEIs involved are not just limited to education: all are research universities with their own strong and internationally established digital research programmes — often bundled in university-level digital research centers of excellence (we mention as a few examples the Digital Science Institute of U Innsbruck, the Network Institute at Amsterdam, the Centre for AI and Machine Learning CAIML at TU Vienna, etc.). The ongoing academic digital research will be brought into our education programmes in multiple ways, closely linked to industry and societal institutions.
EURIDICE itself as a Digital Innovation. The EURIDICE educational offerings are about digital innovation, but interestingly EURIDICE itself is digitally innovative, as it presents three educational innovations that make it stand out:
1. The strong transdisciplinary challenge-based approach by EURIDICE leads to a study programme that is unique in Europe in terms of interdisciplinary content and collaboration. No comparable master study yet exists5, also not at the international level.
2. A new educational concept, called the Collaboratorium for Blended International Hybrid Learning, combining onsite in-person interaction and collaboration, creating an associated sense of learning community, with the (post-covid) scaling possibilities of online teaching and student collaboration. Upgrading digital solutions, digital-physical infrastructure, interoperability, as well as student and staff mobility, are driven by this new concept of international education.
3. The implementation of the European microcredential certification framework in design and delivery of its educational programmes.