Within the broader objective of stimulating innovative learning and teaching practices in Higher Education, PROMISE specifically aims to strengthen the ability of HEIs to develop students’ entrepreneurial competences by introducing an innovative new skill set: Professional Noticing. Understood as the ability of individuals to observe a situation, identify salient information, analyse its meaning and use this to make informed decisions and actions in professional or work-based situations, Professional Noticing (PN) is recognised in research but underdeveloped in HE. The project will address this gap by creating a PN Starter Kit (drawing on desk research and case studies), and PN OERs which can be used in entrepreneurship education, and by conducting an empirical study involving teachers from the participating institutions.

Led by the University of Turku, the project brings together partners from Austria, Finland, Ireland, Denmark and Spain, including 3 HE and 1 VET institutions, all of whom are experts in digitally and pedagogically innovative practices for the HE and VET sector. The project will benefit both teaching staff, who will be upskilled in the area of Professional Noticing, but will also have a positive knock on effect for students. By using the OERs in the empirical study, at least 300 students from the participating institutions will be able to directly benefit from improved entrepreneurship education, and will have opportunities to put their knowledge into action through noticing and problem solving in real-life scenarios. Teachers also benefit: by trialling the methodology, they hone their own noticing skills and become more adept at observing and evaluating students’ transversal competences.

As a bridge between theory and practice, formal and informal learning, this focus on Professional Noticing through the PROMISE project fits in with eucen’s wider work on the use and validation of informal learning. eucen’s commitment to evaluating, sharing and promoting innovation in their network of more than 200+ HEIs will prove essential to ensuring the flexibility of resources, as well as boosting visibility, replication and scalability.

The consortium of PROMISE has six partners:

– Turun Yliopisto, Finland (coordinators)
– Universitat fur Weiterbildung Krems, Austria
– EUCEN, Belgium
– Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
– EUEI, Denmark
– Momentum, Ireland

Here is the link to the project website.