Welcome to NomadTrail:
Virtual Projects for European Digital Natives
Project Reference: 2023-1-DE01-KA220-HED-000153927
The way people work and live is changing due to two significant trends: the digital era and the organisational shift towards projects. We live in a projectized and digitalised world. The adaptation of organisations (e.g. companies, but also universities), processes, and technologies is forcing a change process with a tremendous pace on people, companies and nations. The digital transformation is one of major challenges for companies, society and education. Consequently, it requires new forms of management. In order to cope with disruptive elements and jump innovations, projects have proven to be a good tool and a major organisational pattern. Innovations are driven by projects and start-ups are emerging from such projects. An agile and entrepreneurial mindset develops in projects. Another relevant aspect are the international, intercultural and interdisciplinary competencies that are indispensable in a project. Innovation happens in global, cosmopolitan communities, requiring communication competences. The goal of the project “Virtual Projects for European Digital Natives (NomadTrail)” is to prepare students for this international, digitalized and projectized working environment by developing their project competence, their international communication competence and their entrepreneurial mindset. They are digital natives and they become digital nomads in their work life, working from anywhere at any time, making their career a nomad trail with respective required competences. This requires the competences for working in international, cross-border innovation projects, using agile methods.
Project Information
What you should know about the project?
Project period:
01.12.2023 – 30.11.2026
Project type:
Erasmus+ KA220-HED – Cooperation partnerships in higher education
Grant holder:
Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts (FH Dortmund)
Project coordinator:
Carsten Wolff
Contact:
Ekaterina Hermann
What is our scope, goals, and outcomes?
Project goals:
The goal of NomadTrail is to provide students in Master’s programmes in IT, engineering and business with the competences for successful work in innovative, agile cross-border projects which are conducted in digital collaboration environments. The lecturers and scientific staff need the competences and digital means to deliver such project-based learning. The HEIs need to build the competence to integrate projects and formats of project-based learning into the curricula, specifically with a focus on real-world relevance. Based on the needs, the core objectives of NomadTrail are:
- increase industry-university cooperation and foster entrepreneurship by doing joint, interdisciplinary projects for innovation and by supporting the matching of company cases/problems with student projects/teams
- develop the project competence and project management competence of graduates in IT, technology and business for working in agile and interdisciplinary cross-border innovation projects, including the required digital literacy for using such virtual project environments
Additional, indirectly contributing objectives are:
- develop the competence of the HEI lecturers with respect to international, agile and virtual projects as a tool in project-based learning (PjBL), their relevant digital literacy and their integration into European competence networks like EuroPIM
- efficient and effective project execution using an agile, iterative management approach
- high quality deliverables, ensured by evaluation, improvement, review and release processes
- disseminate the results by broad information within the community, provision of outcomes to EU universities and beyond, scientific validation of the effect and usefulness
To achieve the objectives, the following Outcomes/Deliverables are produced:
- Open Community of Practice (OpenCoP) on “Cross-Border Innovation Projects”
- Digital Framework for Virtual Cross-Border Projects with IT tools, guidelines, tutorials etc.
- 3 x eLearning courses (5 ECTS each) on teamwork, collaboration and management in such projects
- Innovation Projects Programme with 3 project formats: innovation, cross-border, startup project
- 4 digital case studies (videos, documents, animations) derived from relevant industry cases
- Train-the-Trainer (TtT) programme for teachers (8 ECTS)
- Summer School on Innovation Projects
Who is working on the project?
Universities:
Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts (Fachhochschule Dortmund), Dortmund, Germany
KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
Kaunas University of Technology (KTU), Kaunas, Lithuania
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway
University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Bilbao, Spain
Where is our working space?
All partner organisations have the possibility to access the project’s supporting tools and cloud repository.
To enter Nextcloud (coming soon)
NextCloud – content online collaboration platform.
To enter Confluence (coming soon)
Confluence – collaboration wiki tool.
Confluence Tutorials (coming soon)
Confluence – Tuorials.
To enter Moodle (coming soon)
Moodle – learning management system
Funded by
News & Events
The Erasmus+ NomadTrail project’s innovative course, “Agile Cross-Border Project”, concluded successfully on January 11, 2025.
Contact
Ekaterina Hermann
ekaterina.hermann@fh-dortmund.de