ADVICE is aimed at supporting higher education teachers in tackling their digital competence gaps and mismatches, by creating a Digital Competence Learning Hub – an open platform integrating a competence assessment tool and a complementary database of tools and resources available online. The project also aims at preparing a set of recommendations for stakeholders and decision-makers, which should help build the capacity of higher education systems for more inclusive online education.

The global pandemic has faced higher education systems with unprecedented challenges and teachers with a need for a paradigmatic shift. Digital learning has become not a subsidiary form of education, but the only alternative that the educational system had at the time. From 2020 on, higher education teachers need more than digital literacy. They need a comprehensive set of competencies in a range of areas, making digital education of students equal and effective.

Now, there are either self-assessment or skills upgrading tools available. Both are not integrated in a way to support efficient up-skilling, and contributing to a better quality of online, and blended higher education teaching. Thus, we want to increase the accessibility of the already existing tools in a structured way, so that the educators aiming at developing their competences are not forced to do exhausting and time-consuming research throughout the internet to identify their needs. We also want to raise knowledge of stakeholders and decision-makers to strengthen the mechanisms of competence development support.

The overarching methodological principle is a collaborative work of participants, fostering synergy of various fields of knowledge and competence. The partners will be involved in a participatory modelling processes, held online and face to face. The experts and academic teachers will review and update the DigCompEdu framework to identify the most recent and necessary set of digital competences for higher education teachers. In teams, they will develop the self-assessment tool and prepare the database of tools and resources, amplified with the artificial intelligence enhanced crawler. At each step, participants will validate and test the tools with other experts and higher education teachers from their institutions. Three local testing phases (in each partner country) will lead to evaluation and improvement of the main hard result (Digital Competence Learning Hub) before its release.

These activities will be the most fruitful for the academic teachers from the partnering institutions. ADVICE expects that at least 240 higher education teachers and education experts from the partnership will take part in the project’s activities to design and validate the tools. Participation in testing will help them define their competence gaps instantly and show the path for the advancement of their skills.

Apart from standard information transferred via partners’ websites and social media, ADVICE project proposes multiplier events disseminating project outputs: Digital Competence Learning Hub and recommendations. We will involve concrete target groups and create an international network of academic teachers and experts from HE sector through one face to face transnational conference, one online conference for decision-makers and other stakeholders, and four online conferences held in national languages of the participating institutions, targeted especially at the local academic teachers.