Nuria Llin, Manager for Texas Instruments University Program in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Stephan Griebel, Director for Business Development and Alliances Europe for educational solutions for inquiry based learning in K-12 at Texas Instruments Education Technology.

And moderated by:

Maïté Debry, STEM Alliance Project Manager at European Schoolnet.

 

 

16 participants from 10 different countries all over Europe (Austria, Belgium, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Turkey) attended this online session. The webinar began with "welcome and introduction" presentation by Maïté Debry. Maïté provided a general overview of how the project is organised, the calendar of activities and campaigns, and gave a brief introduction to the STEM Alliance resources section in the website. Following this short project introduction, Nuria took over, by giving some general insight on Texas Instruments' (TI) characteristics and activities and then went into detail when describing one of the main items of the session, the TI University Program. As Nuria explained, the program targets Engineering schools' educators and is present all over the world. Its mission is to provide easy and low-cost access to high-quality TI tools to be used at Engineering schools by university professors The full version of the TI development software is available and free of charge to European  universities, together with the technical support and an active online community, the E2E TI Engineer to Engineer (https://e2e.ti.com/). All educational materials are designed working in direct contact with educators and are all open source. Examples of this are the MOOCs, e-learning activities and webinars, containing purely academic material (non-commercial). Besides this, a competition for university students is organized (providing not only economic prices but also training opportunities), a number of research conferences are supported world-wide and industrial liaisons are established, bridging the gap between industry and education. 

 

Finally, to conclude this part of the presentation, she highlighted the fact that with the evolution of the program, university courses had gone from being product oriented to system integration courses and that one of their great challenges was still the lack of graduates with analog and power electronic skills, acknowledging that analog electronics is still a subject difficult to teach.

The webinar went on with Stephan's presentation of Texas Instruments Education Technology. He described how the 3 level approach implemented by TI went from k-12 education technology, to the 12-16 University Programme and to Lifelong Learning (engineer to engineer community). Stephan highlighted the fact, that when developing its resources and tools, TI considers and discusses the most relevant documents delivered by the European Commission, national legislations, regional regulations and other local activities, while keeping the focus on how digitalisation affects all professions and how this can be applied to all schools and subjects. He also mentioned that TI develops products for both learning and teaching, aiming to the professionalization of teachers and educators, while providing up-to-date content and networking with policy makers and a wide range of stakeholders. Finally, Stephan insisted on how the company's hardware, software and apps, are adjusted and provided depending on school needs. In this regard, he commented that a network of teachers named "Teachers Teaching with Technology" or simply "T3" (http://www.t3europe.eu/home/) had been set, with the goal of stablishing a permanent  network of educators developing and sharing teaching methods, content and classroom experience; trainings had been taking place in formats such as school-internal programs, regional conferences, EU events and online trainings; educational content is developed working directly with publishers (since they are the ones "digesting" curriculum requirements; and continues networking is taking place on a day to day basis, gathering together educational associations, universities, Ministries of Education and EU institutions.

Participants to the webinar were able to learn more about the study paths at higher education level and how TI supports universities to be in line with the latest technology and industry needs in terms of skills. In this sense, they all expressed their satisfaction and thanked the speakers for a very constructive and useful presentation on how TI's Education Technology and resources could help students build a stronger foundation for STEM subjects in Europe. In any case, all participants received an email with the slides and links used during the presentations and were provided with a link to fill in an online questionnaire, in order to provide detailed feedback about the webinar. 

You may find the recording of the webinar here: