Team members Yiannis Arapoglou (WIDE), Julie-Ann Sime (Lancaster University), Chryssa Themelis (Lancaster University), Ramon Reichert (Danube University Krems), Elena Xeni (CARDET) at their first meeting.
(CARDET) at their first meeting.
We are delighted to welcome Dr. Chryssa Themelis, a graduate of our Doctoral programme in E-Research and Technology-Enhanced Learning, to the research team of the Visual/Video Literacies (ViLi) project led by Dr. Julie-Ann Sime.
Chryssa will be working with Julie-Ann who has been granted €155,080 by the ERASMUS+ Programme of the European Union to co-ordinate the ViLi project in collaboration with European partners: research and training centre, CARDET (Cyprus); Moodle e-learning company, Wide Services (Greece); and the Department of Image Science, Danube University Krems (Austria).
Visual and video literacy are rising in importance for educators in Higher Education and vocational training, as online technologies are transforming, modernizing and internationalizing education. The UCISA surveys of Technology-Enhanced Learning show that there is increasing use of video technologies to support teaching, learning and assessment in Higher Education. Video technologies are also becoming central components of many informal learning communities for peer-to-peer learning online, such as twitch (social video platform and community for gamers), YouTube, Tumblr (video blogging).
The ViLi project aims to improve the competences of educators in Higher Education and vocational training. We will be researching into how experienced educators are using visual and video technologies and analysing interview data using Informed Grounded Theory to produce a new theory. We will design, develop and refine a range of open educational resources (OER) for educators to use free of charge, and deliver a massive open online course (MOOC) on visual and video literacies, open to all.