CLARIN has received EU funding to help enhance the employability of graduates from linguistics and language-related disciplines
CLARIN has received funding from the EU as Consortium Partner of UPSKILLS (UPgrading the SKIlls of Linguistics and Language Students). UPSKILLS is a 3-year Erasmus+ partnership, launched in September 2020, which aims to identify and tackle the gaps in digital skills of undergraduate students through the development of new learning materials that will enhance the employability of graduates from language-related programs in a range of sectors, including AI, Machine Translation and Data Science.
The project consortium will work together with companies from the language, data and speech industry to cover real-world tasks and scenarios of technology use as part of the course programme. Existing research, data and tools will be integrated into teaching by promoting inquiry-based learning, and by organising train-the-trainers events. Internationalisation will be promoted by offering a unified curriculum component for higher education institutes across several countries and through yearly events aimed at participants from 20+ countries.
The development of this new curriculum component relies on four ingredients to be generated in UPSKILLS (“intellectual outputs”):
- an in-depth skills gap needs analysis to identify a new professional profile of graduates in language-related disciplines, with the associated learning objectives (knowledge, skills and competences), typical tasks and responsibilities that will fit well in contemporary industry and academic environments;
- an overview of best practices and guidelines for integrating research outputs, data and tools into teaching;
- an adaptation of existing - and, where necessary, creation of new - learning content that aims to develop the technical and transferable skills of students of language-related disciplines;
- integration of educational games into the learning content to increase student engagement.
CLARIN will contribute to the needs analysis, and to the integration of research infrastructure services into teaching for (i) language data standards and repositories and (ii) text and speech processing. In addition, CLARIN will support the consortium with the dissemination of the created learning content and best practices in research-based teaching, a.o. by organising a public event in November 2022.
At this stage, the needs analysis has just been completed and the new graduate profile, i.e. language data and project specialist, was announced during an event organised on June 25.
For more information on the UPSKILLS project, visit the UPSKILLS website. To learn more about the involvement of CLARIN in the partnership or to arrange a pilot test of the developed learning materials in your curriculum, please contact CLARIN’s Training and Education Officer, Iulianna van der Lek at i.vanderlek [at] uu.nl (i[dot]vanderlek[at]uu[dot]nl).