NAA Project News: Erasmus Automotive 4:0 project meeting, Berlin
The NAA is a partner in the Erasmus Automotive 4:0 project and the European partners recently met at Dekra in Berlin; this time around there was some significant progress, with tangible outputs from the two days of discussions…
The Auto 4:0 project is developing open education resources (OERs) to support the upskilling of the automotive workforce in the new technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR4), thereby securing employability.
The partners opened the meeting by discussing the 19 job profiles which had been generated by all: It was agreed, by consensus, that it was impossible to generate competencies and training material for 19 job roles, within the time/resource available in the Erasmus project: Instead, the agreed approach was to develop one job profile, which was a combination of six ‘operational’ profiles and one ‘data management’ profile. The partners voted that this European Core Profile should be called ‘Automotive Digital Mechatronic X:0’: It was also agreed that this should be a level 5 job, and should be developed for individuals already in industry (i:e: for upskilling).
Next, the partners discussed which new IR4 competencies this job profile should contain, so that the message was clear from the perspective of the students: A short list of new IR4 competencies was developed.
To finish the first day, the partners discussed what the teaching format/method should be: The concept of ‘Why-Who-Where-How’ was proposed, and from this a template of generic competencies was developed.
To start day 2, the partners agreed that a list of more detailed, context specific competencies was also required: In order to develop these, the partners developed a rough outline of the ‘Automotive Digital Mechatronic X:0’ job profile: This was an important step, as it was the logical approach following the 19 profiles: To finish, the partners developed a 4-step approach for teaching skilled workers and students.
The next steps for the Erasmus team are to fine-tune the ‘Automotive Digital Mechatronic X:0’ job profile, and then to finalise a teaching template to be used by each partner for developing the teaching material. The target for finalising these steps is June 2019, after which time the team can then focus on the training of workers and students, on the evaluation, on dissemination, and on planning the final international meeting in Feb/March 2020.
Overall, this was an action-packed international meeting, with great progress, but still a lot of work is left to complete by June.
Lastly, all partners offer a special thanks to Malte and to Dekra for hosting this meeting.
