Technological literacy for lab and health technology professionals

The main objective of the project is to develop new approaches to teaching technological literacy and digital technology skills and to ensure that recent graduates are ready to familiarise themselves with the new equipment. Partners work together to develop innovative approaches and strategies to improve digital and technological literacy and competence. This is done by identifying and exchanging best practices and expertise that enhance and enhance existing teaching, learning, and practice and empower learners to become drivers of change.

The range of analytical instruments and digital technologies as well as laboratory automation has been on the rise for the last few decades. The fast development combined with limited teaching laboratory equipment and resources available require new pedagogical solutions and innovations to fulfill the growing needs for qualifying the students for their future work. Similar challenges affect the three fields of study included in TechLit, where the students need to learn to use and maintain complex and expensive automated devices and embrace technologically challenging content.  

All three education programs are dual training programs. This means that part of the teaching takes place on campus, and part as structured internships in potential future workplaces. For RAD and BIO this is in clinical hospital settings, for LAB it is in research or development laboratories in industries and universities.  

These new digital technologies include, for example, artificial intelligence (AI), which is more and more central to
discussions of the future of medical imaging, e.g., x-rays and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and is also very relevant to consider for other applications in these fields of education. Another example is bioinformatics, which are central for processing and understanding high-throughput automated laboratory analyses (e.g., in DNA sequencing) in both BIO and LAB. One of the key challenges for educators in these fields is thus to ensure that young professionals are prepared, and have the skills and competences to use, understand, and develop new digital technologies throughout their professional careers. In the TechLit project, educators and researchers in the fields of laboratory and health technology from universities in four European countries will develop and test novel approaches to teaching technological literacy for students of BIO, RAD, and LAB. The development and implementation of these teaching innovation will take place in dialogue with representatives of future employers (who are also teachers in the practice parts of the education programs) for the students.
Already in the preparations for the TechLit application we have experienced that by working across these three related education programs, we have access to a richer understanding of the education challenges in meeting the needs driven by the rapidly developing digital technologies in the fields, and we will further mine this in the implementation and dissemination of the project results.