Tallinn uni secures major grant to boost education innovation
A Tallinn University (TU) project has been selected to receive a 2.4-million-euro investment from the ERA Chair fund of the European Commission. The grant is meant to promote research-based education innovation in Estonia.
The money for the project, “Cross-Border Educational Innovation through Technology-Enhanced Research," will be also used to establish an international research group in the university. In addition to research, the soon-to-be created group will also help encourage education innovation on school, state and regional level and bring the experiences of other countries to Estonia.
“The work of the new research team will directly support creating a center of excellence in education innovation in Tallinn University. It will simultaneously change the approach to learning as well as help execute the digital revolution in schools, both of which are targets of the Estonian Lifelong Learning strategy. With the help of this project, Tallinn University will start to develop its education innovation focus field,” said Kristi Vinter, director of the TU Institute of Educational Sciences.
Mart Laanpere, the research coordinator of the project and a senior research fellow at the Tallinn University Institute of Informatics, added that investment will bring the research and development of education innovation in Estonia to a new level. “The research group will comprise of experts from educational sciences, informatics, nature and social sciences. Merging scientists from different fields and diverse research traditions and databases with the open data available in the e-state registries will help us define the patterns of these reforms and analyse the different aspects of education innovation on a completely new level.”
The group will be put together over the next six months and it will consist of six internationally acclaimed scientists. The work will begin by the end of 2015; the project will last for five years.
The new project will also enhance cooperation with the Graz University of Technology in the field of knowledge management, the Open University of the Netherlands in the field of analytics, the RWTH Aachen University in the field of cloud technologies and the CICERO center of Helsinki University, with whom a modern research center will be developed.
Editor: M. Oll