Coordinated higher institution responses to digitalization (ESCALATE)

EU ERASMUS+ funded project - increasing levels of digital competences for employability, upskilling

Project Timescale: 01.11.2019 - 31.10.2021

Project Partners: Universities of Vest Din Timisoara (Romania), Stirling (UK, Scotland), Exeter (UK, England), Magdeburg (Germany), MILANO-BICOCCA (Italy) and PROSPEKTIKER (Spain)

The project’s research aims to assist universities in implementing activities designed to increase the levels of digital competences for employability, upskilling, according with a growing range of employment generated by the digital economy, aligned with the needs of and opportunities offered by the labour market and linked to professional profiles. Stirling’s contribution is linked to our collaborative Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance and Privacy (CRISP) and includes consideration of related issues such Surveillance and Privacy.

The project will help to improve understanding of the scale and depths of the challenges of digitalization faced by universities and others by focusing on:

Understanding university disruption and the threats posed to Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) and the labour market from digitalization
Supporting the decision-making process on responses to digitalization
Identifying innovations which can be employed to help understand and tackle digitalization impact
Eliciting more effective local & regional HEI responses to digitalization across Europe

Direct target groups that this project aims to engage include: higher education institutions, education providers, teachers, learners for existing and new digital skills provision. Indirect target groups consist primarily of: citizens with low levels of digital skills at risk from digitalization, who face a need to acquire digital knowledge and skills to use digital technologies; and labour market forecasters such as labour market observatories.

The research from the project seeks to support the community of universities and other education providers, labour market observatories and analysts across Europe to help their decision-making on regional responses to digitalization.

Visit the ESCALATE project website

More information

Contacts: Dr Aleksandra Webb; Prof. Ron McQuaid; Prof. William Webster

^{This project is part funded by EU ERASMUS+ grant 2019-1-RO01-KA203-063214}