Monday, March 27, saw the top grant getters of the European Union convene in Luxembourg on invitation of the European Commission in order to take stock of achievements, exchange, and increase coherence of the current projects in the field of Digital Learning managed by the unit G3 ‘Learning, Multilingualism & Accessibility’ in DG CONNECT. The meeting also served the purpose of inputting how the 30 ongoing projects can contribute to deliver the Digital Single Market agenda of the European Commission, both individually and/or jointly. Dr. Fridolin Wild participated in his role as scientific director of the WEKIT project.
The meeting identified five key areas, among them – prominently – Augmented Reality and Wearable Enhanced Learning. AR and wearable enhanced learning is an emerging market with huge potential for growth, interfacing with other initiatives such as Industry 4.0. While pockets of innovation can be found, collecting evidence, sharing experience, and good practice needs more European engagement to implement the widest impact possible. Content is still being seen as driving force (‘content is king’) and taking the agenda for the digital single market and digitization of European industry seriously means creating large pools of wearable content and 3D open (educational) resources, while lowering entry barriers through capturing and in situ authoring systems. More standardization and more standard platforms are needed, also developing new models for data ownership, privacy in an emerging medium, and business models to finance requisition of hard- and software. Developing new learning and instruction methodologies, compatible with existing ones, should be given special focus to facilitate upgrading of existing content with transformation methodologies, to support new key competences of the 21st century.