Introducing ELSE: A Quest for Eco/logical Learning and Simulation Environments

This paper will present an overview of a thirty-month Erasmus + Project, ELSE (Eco/logical Learning and Simulation Environments in Higher Education), involving eleven European Universities, of which the author, with her university, is a member partner, and Entropy-KN, an Italian IT firm specialized in Technology Enhanced Learning (T. EL.). ELSE aims to promote pedagogical innovation in higher education through novel applications of digital technologies particularly tailored to the teaching of Humanities. Initiated in September 2018 with a survey of innovative tertiary education teaching methods already being implemented and an assessment of their efficacy, the project has involved its partners in the design of problem-solving simulation environments and of IT and ICT integrable applications, such as mobile Apps, stimulating learner autonomy and cooperative learning, besides educators’ action-research, through learning-by-doing, co-designing and gamification. The pedagogical principles inspiring the project will be briefly described in the paper together with a preliminary analysis of the results obtained, a focus on the products designed by the Italian partners, and an indication of the next steps to be taken.