Developing Online Courses for Digital Soft Skills: Experience of a Pan-European Project

Digitalization has been a part of higher education institutions for years, but the needs of society and the experiences of COVID-19 set new demands on the digital competences of educators and learners. Improvements of digital and transversal competences are needed among European educators and learners to ensure that everyone can live, work, and study successfully in the digital age. This paper describes the work undertaken in the Erasmus+ co-funded project “Digital Soft Skills @ Ulysseus”, which aimed to address the digital soft skills gap. Initially, digital soft skills frameworks were created for both learners and educators. Based on the frameworks, 12 online courses were designed and created to support the development of educators' and learners' competences. The courses support modularity, so that trainers can easily customize them as part of their own courses and use them to promote the development of digital soft skills with high quality. Digital badges obtained from the online courses make it possible to demonstrate competence both in studies and in working life. This paper aims to describe and to share lessons learned from designing and development of digital soft skills courses in innovative learning processes across international network learning communities