Baltic DigiTour

Baltic DigiTour

Seed Money Project: Baltic DigiTour

 Imagine being part of a dynamic online group of like-minded practitioners to mutually support each other keeping pace with ever new digital challenges and opportunities! How to set up and maintain such group for tourism attractions is what the project “Connectivist Massive Open Online Courses for Digitalization in Baltic Tourism Attractions” – or in short “Baltic DigiTour“ – is about to investigate.

“Baltic DigiTour“ is a seed money project, co-financed by Interreg Baltic Sea Region within the European Regional Development Fund. Seed-money shall support the consortium of this one-year-project to conduct background investigations and thereby prepare for developing a fully-fledged main project.

Implementation period

01.10.2020 -30.09.2021

Partners

Knowledge on digitalization is constantly evolving, vastly spread across organizations and countries, and thus very complex to pool under one organizational entity’s governance. An online community approach to distributed knowledge agglomerating in a virtual space could provide an alternative to deal with this complexity. Building an online knowledge community is embraced by the concept of cMOOCs: connectivist Massive Open Online Courses. While MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) provide teacher-based knowledge publicly online and therefore scaling the outreach of teacher knowledge, cMOOCs emphasize the collaboration of learners and other knowledge sources. The connectivist approach sees all participants as both learners and teachers, with the mutual exchange building the dynamic content and value of learning.

In the current seed money project “Baltic DigiTour“, four different analysis will help to further detail the requirements and opportunities for a future main project:

  • Investigation of existing cMOOC models and success criteria (cMOOC analysis).
  • Initial research on content experts e.g. in universities, bloggers, online groups, projects on digitalization in tourism (Content matter experts’ analysis)
  • Analysis of needs and requirements of potential participants of the knowledge community and those who can make use of the developed underlying cMOOC concept and transfer it to other areas both within tourism and beyond (Stakeholder analysis)
  • Investigation of suitable cMOOC IT platforms along with an evaluation of resources, limitations, functionalities (IT platform analysis)

Based on the findings, gaps will be identified and how an international project could help fill these. A full project plan will be developed from that, including the set-up of a suitable consortium. In addition, funding programs will be analyzed for suitability for the potential main project.

The project supports the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR) in the Policy Area of ‘Tourism’.

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