The “CLIP: Critical visual media Literacy and emPowerment” is a newly approved European co-funded project that addresses the digital transformation through the development of digital and green readiness, resilience and capacity, of the Higher Education (HE) sector.

Thus, CLIP project aims to strengthen the digital capabilities of the HE sector by boosting their resilience to information overload, manipulation and polarization, mitigating the risks of bias in visual representations by providing young people (within and outside Universities) with the capacity to critically understand media and images, and the way those are used in education, news and online narratives. Specifically:

CLIP has already kicked off its activities on collecting good practices on Visual Media Literacy and tracking visual misinformation in Europe.

The identified good practices and the consultation of experts and practitioners via interviews following a semi-structured grid, will lead to the conduction of a Report on Visual Media Literacy in European HE and the recommendations on the structure, content and tools to be used in the training course that will follow. More precisely, the CLIP Micro Learning course on critical Visual Media Literacy and Fluency will consist of 40 hours training, targeting HEIs students of Journalism and Communication, also available to anyone interested in taking part. It will provide the participants with the necessary understanding about the importance of images in present societies and with particular skills to detect image bias as well as stereotypes in visual artifacts.

At least a hundred and fifty (150) trainees from three (3) CLIP countries, including Greece, will be involved in the process and will be equipped with an advanced understanding of how cultural biases and stereotypes are embedded in the apparent and alleged neutrality of images. A related catalogue of operational tools, summarizing the findings from the training modules, will be shared and further promoted.

The outer goal is to incorporate the learning strategies for visual media literacy into the training process of the HE sector in other learning environments (ranging from secondary schools to informal and non-formal digital skills learning), in order to encourage critical thinking and contribute to inclusive and non-biased societies.

The DAISSy Research Group of the Hellenic Open University (HOU) is the Greek project partner of CLIP and will be actively involved in all its activities and deliverables. Furthermore, DAISSy, with its long experience, will be responsible for the design, development and maintenance of the e-learning platform and will coordinate the drafting of the course content, to which all partners will contribute. In addition, it will be one of the partners responsible for the piloting of the course in its Institution and the respective assessment and evaluation process.

Lastly, DAISSy will contribute thoroughly in the development of a set of Guidelines, Recommendations and tools to support academic staff in the implementation of learning strategies for visual media literacy. This will be achieved by a Toolkit in English, Italian and Greek that will provide operational guidelines on how to integrate visual media literacy in the learning offer of HEIs which will get available to anyone interested.

The CLIP is an eighteen-month  project co-funded by the ERASMUS+/KA220-HED – Cooperation partnerships in Higher Education Program of the European Union and it is coordinated by the UNIMED – UNIONE DELLE UNIVERSITA DEL MEDITERRANEO (Italy) with LIBERA UNIVERSITA DI LINGUE E COMUNICAZIONE (Italy), ALL DIGITAL (Belgium) and HELLENIC OPEN UNIVERSITY (Greece) as partners. The DAISSy Research Group of the HOU plans to exploit its wide networking and embrace respective stakeholders aiming at the multiple diffusion and sustainability of the project results and impact.

For more information on the CLIP project, and other activities of DAISSy:

• Website : https://daissy.eu/,https://clipproject.eu/
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