DESCRIPTION  

Covid-19 epidemic has created new challenges for the development of Smart and Sustainable Cities. It has been proven that it is not sufficient anymore just to focus on providing services for quality of life, or a better business ecosystem, but we need to prepare cities, so that they can manage, adapt, maintain and ensure city services and enhance the quality of life in the event of hazards, shocks, and stresses. Following this concept analysis, resilience does not include only earthquakes, fires, floods, etc. but also whatever disrupts significantly the operation of a city either occasionally or periodically as well.

Even though some standards and projects exist in this area, we have not yet reached a consensus on a common city resilience model that will be able to describe what exactly constitutes resilience and how a city becomes resilient. Furthermore, up to now, little emphasis has been given to the way municipalities are organized for addressing hazards; and even less on training the personnel on the new skills required.

According to our point of view, a new job profile named “Smart CIty Resilience Officer – SCRO” needs to be defined, which will sufficiently describe the required competences for facing these needs in the context of smart cities. This is because cities are becoming more and more smart and while this transformation creates more threats for cities’ resilience (e.g. cyberattacks), it also puts more arrows in the quiver of future cities on the road to achieve satisfactory levels of resilience (e.g. GIS monitoring). Apparently, we need to address the competences gap between current and desirable future competences of municipalities workforce by emphasizing on these emerging needs. Exactly on this subject area, this technical report presents the results of a survey that attempts to define the required skills for the “Smart and Resilience City Officer”.

PROJECT OUTCOMES

CRISIS project relates to the Horizontal priority “Addressing digital transformation through development, resilience, and capacity” as it targets a shortage in digital and transferrable skills identified in resilience officers of smart cities municipalities. It will develop a new job profile for Smart City Resilient Officers (SCROs) and it will design, develop and deliver a pilot training program to certify the first cohort of SCROs. It proposes a holistic approach for the professional development of trainees envisioning to enrich their fan of competences and increase their employability on the basis of actual competence gaps and. It addresses the situation driven by the COVID-19 crisis, which has heavily impacted education by accelerating the need for individual flexibility and the ever-increasing demand for digital skills.

 Secondly, CRISIS project relates to sectoral priority “Stimulating innovative learning and teaching practices”, and it will design and implement a learner-centered curriculum, an objective that will be better achieved through flexible learning journeys enabled by the curriculum’s modular structure. Following, market needs analysis done as a preparation activity for this project, the selected competences of the SCRO job profile will be analyzed on a Learning Outcomes (LO) basis translating needs into assessable outcomes for learners. The LO-based approach will facilitate the shift from the conventional teacher-centered learning model to the learner-centered approach and ensure compliance with the labor market’s commands reducing skill mismatches.

 Moreover, to support learners in efficiently achieving the identified learning outcomes, CRISIS will rely on a Learning Journey Design (LJD) tool that will be developed to determine the appropriate educational strategy for each learner (why, what, and how to learn). Therefore, CRISIS will focus on implementing trans-disciplinary approaches and novel pedagogical models including contemporary approaches such as concept mapping, problem-solving, group-based, project-based, peer, and participatory learning in order to engage, inspire, motivate, and stimulate learners throughout the learning process.

Upon its completion, the project will help to accelerate the HEIs transformation throughout Europe, in order to train the future generations in co-creating knowledge for a resilient, inclusive, and sustainable society and cities. This project will have a positive impact on the individuals in developing key competences, the municipalities that hire or will hire them, and finally on a much larger scale in European cities that want to develop resilience capacity.

 Overall the objectives of CRISIS project are concrete, important, and numerous:

a) Provide in a structured and systematic way a framework for educating smart cities staff on resilience, a need that recently was proven of paramount importance,

b) Develop an innovative curriculum for SCROs (currently there is non-available),

c) Provide innovative learning tools,

d) Close the competence and skills gap for municipalities officials,

e) Promote the European Collaboration on smart cities’ education,

f) Increase the awareness of the Member States, Local Authorities, Municipalities and of various stakeholders that the resilience of smart cities is a complex and difficult to acquire competences,

g) Build-up on important work delivered from other ERASMUS+ projects, such as SmartDevOps project.

PARTNERS

The consortium of Agile2Learn project consists of the following partner organizations:

• Coordinator – University of Thessaly, Greece (https://www.uth.gr )
• Partner – Hellenic Open University, Greece (https://www.eap.gr )
• Partner – University of Nicosia, Cyprus  (https://www.unic.ac.cy/)
• Partner – Universidade do Minho, Portugal ( https://www.uminho.pt/)
• Partner – Fernuniversitat in Hagen, Germany (https://www.fernuni-hagen.de/)