The ATHENA European University Alliance’s Soft Skills Academy

Prof. (Associate) Konstantinos Petridis (HMU, Greece)

The Outline

• The ATHENA European Alliance: Consortium, Objectives and Achievements.
• What are the soft skills. Why Soft Skills? How do we teach them? How do we evaluate them?
• The ATHENA Soft & Research Skills Academy: Lectures and how can you join us.

The Outline

• The ATHENA European Alliance: Consortium, Objectives and Achievements.
• What are the soft skills. Why Soft Skills? How do we teach them? How do we evaluate them?
• The ATHENA Soft & Research Skills Academy: Lectures and how can you join us.

The ATHENA Alliance

• A consortium of nine +one small - medium Universities: IPP (Portugal), HMU (Greece), USIEGEN (Germany), UM (Slovenia), UNICUSANO (Italy), UORL (France), VGTU (Lithuania), UVIGO (Spain), MCSU (Poland) and Abdullah Gul University(Turkiye).
• The Alliance is technologically oriented: nanoelectronics, new materials, photonics, robotics, quantum computing, cybersecurity, AI, VR & AR.
• The Big Vision: One University with ten campuses!

https://athena-uni.eu/

The ATHENA Alliance

• A new vision in Higher Education: focused on competence based pedagogies with student centered actions.
• A focus on blended actions: activities in classroom but also online.
• Priority to the leverage tools such as: microcredentials and blockchain technology.

https://athena-uni.eu/

The ATHENA Success Stories

• Research:
• Online Expertise Platform.
• Online Shared Facilities Platform.
• The ATHENA Research Book.
• Definition of Research Joint Actions.
• Announcements of joint research projects and grants.
• Distributed Research Facilities.

The ATHENA Success Stories

• Education:
• BlendedEd Initiative.
• The formulation of the Cluster of Courses.
• The implementation of four COIL Courses.
• A joint Erasmus Mundus in nanotechnology and nano sensing.
• Inclusivity: Lifelong learners, sign language, virtual exchange.
• The policy paper about blended mobility.
• One LMS platform.

The ATHENA Success Stories

• Observatory of HE:
• Inform and Disseminate Transformative Technologies.
• Inform and Disseminate Key Enabled Technologies.
• Inform and Disseminate Pedagogies of the Next Day.
• Organization of Colloquial Talks in Science, in Pedagogies and in Policies.
• Organization of Training Events for students.
• The ATHENA Technology Forum (May 2023, Chania).

Internationalization

• Apply all the EWP policies.
• Promote mobilities within the Alliance.
• Build the ATHENA Internationalization Strategy.
• Intergrade new Associated Partners into the consortium particularly from Asia and Africa regions.

Contact us

Email: c.petridischania@gmail.com

Telephone: +306932250964

Prof. (Associated) Kostas Petridis (ATHENA General Secretary)

The Outline

• The ATHENA European Alliance: Consortium, Objectives and Achievements.
• What are the soft skills. Why Soft Skills? How do we teach them? How do we evaluate them?
• The ATHENA Soft & Research Skills Academy: Lectures and how can you join us.

Why Soft Skills?

• Soft Skills are the nontechnical skills, abilities, and traits that workers need to function in a specific employment environment.
• Skill: A knowledge that can be applied under real life situations.
• HEIs have shown a little emphasis in Soft Skills (cultivation or assessing them as a part of the general curriculum); the most successful way to teach them is through the leverage of modern pedagogies.

Why Soft Skills?

• Soft Skills are essential for employability & survival/promotion within very competitive & multicultural environments.
• Soft Skills are considered as important as hard skills for employers.
• Soft Skills allows us to collaborate with others in a seamless and frictionless manner.
• Soft skills are essential along the humans & machine interaction. Soft Skills are those can be least replaced by machines and AI.

It is well proven that hard skills contribute to only around 15% of

one’s success, whereas soft skills contribute to around 85%.

Why Soft Skills?

Effective workers must be able to productively use:

Resources: allocating time, money materials, space and staff.

Interpersonal: working on teams, teaching others, serving customers, leading, negotiating and be adaptive in various environments.

Information: acquiring and evaluating data, organizing & maintaining files, interpreting & communicating.

Systems: understanding social, organizational and technological systems

Technology: selecting equipment and tools, applying technology to specific tasks.

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Soft and Digital Skills are essential for a modern employee

Why Soft Skills?

Why Soft Skills

How to Teach them & How to assess them

• Teach using real life scenarios and challenges - authentic pedagogies: soft skills cultivation can carried out as part of any teaching subject.
• Combine the theoretical principles with workshops (BIPs).
• Focus on learner centered approaches.
• Need to intergrade the social and emotional dimensions into teaching and learning.
• It is not only the framework will be used but also the trainer’s soft skills.

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How to Teach them & How to assess them

• Move away from knowledge standards tests; focus on academic output ‘leaves unmeasured important features such as social, affective and behavioural aspects.
• Evaluate processes rather than outcomes; the process is evaluated by both the student and the teacher.

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How to Teach them & How to assess them

• PBL approach: teamwork, critical thinking, growth mindset. Communication skills. During the process the teachers are focused on the evaluation of the specific soft skills.
• PBL approach: students also select a soft skill they wish to develop. Every two weeks the teacher provides them some development tools (a map) to create the milestones for development.

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Combinations: Flipped Classroom, Scrum, Design Thinking!!!

How to Teach them & How to assess them

• Part One: Gaining knowledge/understanding of the skill: through articles, lectures, TED talks and guided questions.
• Part Two: Identifying one’s personal starting point and setting development goals.
• Part Three: Reflective and practice exercise to develop the skill in daily life.
• Two formal assessments from the teacher: midterm and final one.

The Development Tool

How to Teach them & How to assess them

• Stage One: The teacher selects and presents the students with 2-3 soft skills that relevant to the course, are integral to it, contribute to it, or can be cultivated within it.
• Stage Two: The teacher presents the concept, the importance of the soft skills for success and well-being in the 21^st century.
• Part Three: The teacher presents the skills selected to be part of the course, explains them and highlights their relevance for the course.
• Part Four: Each student selects one of the soft skills teacher presented to be his or her target of development within the course. The selection should be based on self-reflection.
• Part Five: The student is given a personal roadmap include activities for the development of the skill: understanding and demonstrating it.

The Process

How to Teach them & How to assess them

• Stage Six: The students document their development, using activities, reading materials, reflection questions and exercise guidelines provided them.
• Stage Seven: After 5-6 weeks in the course, the students should submit whatever they had done up to that point and receive feedback. The student integrates the received feedback into his/ger assignment. The final assessment therefore contains all the assignments and exercise of the entire semester including the intermediate one.
• Stage Eight: At the end students submit their review of the entire process and also provide areas of further development.
• Part Nine: The teacher accordingly assesses the work done by the students and provides feedback twice in the course of the process: after the goal setting stage and at the end of the course. The assessment of the end product is based on the extent to which the student shows understanding of the concepts, commitment to the process, insights along the way, development since the starting point, and not by the level they have reached at the end of the process.

The Process

How to Teach and Assess Soft Skills�Assessment Tool for Students

How to Teach them & How to assess them

Peer Feedback (optional)

• Students gather in small groups, share, discuss their journeys, provide support and insights to each other.
• Groups are formed or based on the skills have selected.
• Their discussions are mainly directed by the guiding questions provided them at the beginning.
• The feedback received each student is documented by them and is added to the reflective journal with the student’s feeling.

How to Teach them & How to assess them

Evaluation of student’s perceptions

• At the end of the process a questionnaire (using the Likert scale) is distributed among students to evaluate their views about the targeted soft skill(s) development.

How to Teach and Assess Soft Skills�Assessment Tool for Students

How to Teach and Assess Soft Skills�Assessment Tool for the intermediate assignment (Teachers)

How to Teach and Assess Soft Skills�Assessment Tool for the final assignment (Teachers)

The Outline

• The ATHENA European Alliance: Consortium, Objectives and Achievements.
• What are the soft skills. Why Soft Skills? How do we teach them? How do we evaluate them?
• The ATHENA Soft & Research Skills Academy: Lectures and how can you join us.

THE ATHENA Soft & Research Skills Development

• Development of the Soft Skills Academy operated with the Study in Israel initiative.
• One of the four COIL Modules of ATHENA.
• Lecturers: from academia and industry.
• Future Development: offer it as a MOOC & introduce classroom activities.

The ATHENA SOFT SKILLS Academy

Watch all of them again: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3OWQw2onmC_BHu0M7yMzEgpbul2r8xW5

We are looking for partners!!!!

Thank you. �c.petridischania@gmail.com