Welcome!

Before you start attending this course, we would like to tell you something about the idea from which it was born and how it was conceived and implemented.

First of all, we would like to introduce ourselves as an international team that gathered around a project whose title is ‘SOFTEN’ (Softenproject) to understand how the development of soft skills can be integrated into STEM university courses to ensure the green transition.

We come from Poland, Greece, Finland, Lithuania, Italy, and Portugal. Some of us belong to the university world, others are involved in the private sector. This synergy allowed us to discuss the sensitive yet extremely well-known and widespread topic of soft skills.

The SOFTEN team at the training

We asked ourselves “What skills should our university students in science, technology, and mathematics have at the end of their studies to enter the world of work in the best possible way and to put their technical skills to good use thanks to their transversal skills?”.

Hence the birth of this MOOC, with the idea of proposing to STEM teachers a reflection on the importance of soft skills, an in-depth study of what we have called green soft skills, i.e. those necessary to achieve the real transformation that will enable our world and our lives to be more sustainable.

The MOOC, then, develops by proposing four categories of soft skills and how a teacher can enable his or her students to develop these skills during his or her course, even if it is a strictly technological course, where discussion and confrontation are therefore not foreseen; even if there are many students in the class.

The MOOC has precisely the objective of suggesting some techniques, even very simple ones, that will enable students to acquire these skills by, first of all, becoming aware of them and developing an awareness of their way of learning in a world - our world, in which it is necessary every day to be able learn, to understand new phenomena, to adapt but also to have a critical look.

soften

To make the videos for this MOOC, we decided to experiment with some artificial intelligence tools: the content was entirely written by us, as were texts, tables, infographics, and reading suggestion lists. We enlisted the help of artificial intelligence to create the avatars to be used as speakers, i.e. those who will illustrate some of the teaching techniques we want to propose to you.

In the MOOC videos, you will then meet Anna and Justin (the names are from our imagination), who will lead you through the discovery of some straightforward and intuitive tools that we hope will also be an opportunity for you to reflect on how you can involve your students to ensure that they are actively learning.

Avatars

For each of the techniques that you will see illustrated very quickly in the videos, you will then find Methodology cards, i.e. cards in an editable format that propose the presented techniques with more details, offering some suggestions on how to prepare and manage it in the classroom or on what the phases are, emphasising what the objectives are and suggesting what we believe is the green characteristic that can be attributed to this technique, i.e. its ability to change the point of view on sustainability. These cards are editable in the sense that they are in a format that you can download and on which you yourself can make notes and try to describe how it might be applicable in your classroom in your student group. We are sure that this format will be more convenient for you.