We continue our “Meet Our Members” section with Igor Balaban from Faculty of Organization and Informatics (University of Zagreb)

Could you tell us a little bit about your organisation’s mission? 

Faculty of Organization and Informatics of the University of Zagreb (FOI) is a national higher education institution internationally recognized for its academic excellence in education, scientific and research work as well as for the knowledge transfer within the fields of organization and informatics and the complementary disciplines. Our mission is triple:

1/ To conduct research in information and communication sciences as well as in other complementary scientific disciplines, which can be performed within international and national research and development projects, leading to its implementation in the education process or transfer of knowledge;

2/To deliver unique accredited study programmes in informatics, organization and economics at undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate levels as well as those pertaining to lifelong learning;

3/To encourage, organize and execute applied projects and transfer the existing and newly discovered knowledge to economy, public services and to the society in general.

How does CRISS fit with this mission?

Being one of three CRISS partners from the Academia, FOI is strongly connected to scientific background of CRISS. The main aim of the CRISS – to contribute to the modernization of the educational and training system towards the adoption of new cloud-based teaching methodologies and services that enable the acquisition of digital competences – will be reached through the development of innovative infrastructure for personalized learning based on methodological roots developed by partners from academia.

CRISS perfectly fits into FOI’s mission to get engaged in applied projects and transfer the existing and newly discovered knowledge to different educational systems and technological partners from industry. Also, the design of the new platform is an excellent opportunity for FOI research team to implement the newest scientific findings in the field of ICT in education and get valuable results based on users’ activity and experience with such novel platform.

What is your role in the CRISS project?

Our primary goal within the project is to successfully deliver all activities FOI is responsible for. Considering the focus of our scientific background the main tasks we are contributing in are as follows:

(1) Development of pedagogical and methodological framework for certification that will be supported by the CRISS platform;

(2) Further development of ePortfolio module;

(3) Implementation of Digital Badges;

(4) Analysis and interpretation of the results of on-line and on-site pilots; and

(5) Development of instrument to measure the success of CRISS platform

(6)Scientific Dissemination of Project Results.

In your opinion, which of the digital competences listed by the EU do you find most important? Why?

As ICT spreads throughout our societies, touching more and more parts of our and our children’s lives, so digital competence has become essential for every individual. We are confronted with ICT technologies from our youngest years and ICT has spread throughout the work place, so that the large majority of jobs now require some form of digital competences.

The importance of digital competence was recognized by all highest EU institutions including the European Parliament and the European Council that stress in its recommendation the key competences for lifelong learning where they identified digital competence as one of eight key competences essential for all individuals in a knowledge-based society.

Recognizing the crucial role of digital competence in today’s society, the European Commission’s 2010 Digital Agenda for Europe devoted a whole pillar to digital literacy, skills and inclusion. Furthermore, recognizing the need for indicators to measure the extent of digital competence in Europe, one of the actions of the Digital Agenda was to “propose by 2013 EU-wide indicators of digital competence and media literacy”.

FOI team deeply understands these aspirations and we believe that all CRISS partners share our vision to have a holistic approach to these issues as well as to the development of digital competences from childhood. In that sense, it is quite difficult to name only one competence as the most important since we believe that it is essential for an individual to have the opportunity to equally develop all competences defined by CRISS team of experts.

Moreover, within our certification system based on gamification principles, each individual and their mentors and parents will have clear understanding of how and when he or she could gain or improve a specific personal competence and why a specific competence is important for his or her personal development.

How can we make students more engaged with ICT education? 

Our recent research among over one hundred primary and secondary schools in Croatia showed that the ICT awareness of school management and teachers is one of the key triggers for successful implementation of ICT in teaching and learning processes along with an adequate ICT infrastructure.

Therefore, we believe that only empowered teachers and parents can help students to embrace and use ICT in education in a proper way. In this respect, we believe that one of the most important strength of CRISS is the engagement of tutors and facilitators as well as our focus to create the innovative infrastructure based on standardized grounds and most recent findings in adoption and use of ICT in education. Therefore, on the one hand, the universal adoption of common CRISS standards will support teachers, tutors, facilitators as well as parents and teachers from all around Europe.

On the other hand, from a technical perspective, CRISS standards will facilitate the development of new technologies and help our innovators to focus on developing best tools rather than solving technical challenges created by multiple sets of standards. In the end, all this should influence students’ motivation to use the CRISS technology which in the end will lead to increased use and their satisfaction with the use of CRISS platform.

What is the most exciting aspect of taking part in CRISS for you and your organisation? 

CRISS project certainly sparks excitement among members of FOI team of researchers. Being involved in such a project with 14 partners from 9 countries is a challenge and an opportunity that every researcher hopes for.

At the moment, FOI researchers are included in more than 20 active national and international projects within different research fields and the project culture is quite strong in our institution because we believe that international projects encourage further or additional links and enhance future funding and research opportunities, increase knowledge capacity of our team members, enable us to access unique sites and countries and foster us to address transnational or global problems.

Personally, the CRISS coordinator at FOI, assist. prof. Igor Balaban, PhD takes CRISS proudly as a reward for a decade of hard work within a number of similar national and international initiatives and projects. The vision and goals of CRISS is something we all strongly believe in and therefore enjoy being involved in this creation of innovative future. Furthermore, CRISS will enable the development and growth of research group at FOI esp. if we take into account the value of research data obtained from 490 schools, 2.2290 teachers, and 25.400 students as foreseen by the pilots. Such large amount of data will allow us to further test the usage of ICT in education widening our horizons and enabling us to push the upper limits of existent knowledge a bit further thus creating an added value not just for academic community, but for practice as well.