What is the Academy?
The Lead3.0 Academy is a digital learning platform developed over the last two years to support the development of strategic e-leaderships skills by bringing together the best and most up-to-date content available online. Utilising the vast array of online materials and generating new ones, the Academy aims to introduce the emerging e-leadership skills of students and managers.
What are the characteristics of the Academy?
The Academy is designed for easy navigation between multiple topics and courses that are of interest to users, whether this be developing the skills needed to organise and administer online meetings, or developing their critical thinking skills. Users will be able to enter the Academy and openly join the courses that are available. However, to take it further, it is the projects intention to work with multiple stakeholders in industry, business schools and universities to reach a much wider audience. For example, we are currently working with university lecturers to offer the learning opportunities of the Academy to students in order to progress their learning. Over recent months the Academy has been tested by multiple individuals across both academic and industry to both test its robustness and clarity to users from all EU member countries. The capacity building sessions led to a number of key areas for improvement that have been implemented over the last few months, these include a rating system for the OER database, development of an instructional welcome video to the platform and more intuitive controls to allow users to self-guide their activities. Another key improvement that is being developed currently is the use of video chat within the platform. This additional functionality is hoped to further solidify the relationship between users and trainers to gain the face-to-face educational impact across large distances.
What can the Academy do for me?
The Academy offers multiple benefits to members, both from a user perspective and more wider institution level of businesses and academia. Users have the option to take charge of their own learning experience and pick either a structured or cherry-picking approach to engaging with content. From an institution perspective both management trainers and lecturers have the ability to engage with content, tailor it to their groups needs and provide additional materials to further develop the learning process. The OER database is designed to evolve in line with the Lead3.0 Community to not only take learning materials, but share good practice from globally aware trainers. The use of the Academy will also allow users to broaden their international horizons with users coming from a global context with different cultures, traditions and habits guiding the way they act. By sharing these differences within group tasks, users can gain a greater understanding of this perspectives which can lead to improved personal development.
As the Academy picks up momentum, it is anticipated that the platform will continue to evolve in order to provide learners with the most up-to-date learning experience. As an EU funded project, it would be understandable to see a disruption following the end of the three year period, however this will be far from the case with Lead3.0. Plans are in place to ensure a sustainable future can be created with the project outputs and the relationships the project has built with external stakeholders. Currently a number of partnerships have been established to enable educational institutions and businesses to take advantage of the learning opportunity within the Academy, as well as to share their own knowledge and best practice with other users.
For further information on how to work closer with the Lead3.0 team, please contact us