Meet mentors from the Hub's Accelerator programme

Here, three mentors share their insights on digitalisation and education, and what they are looking forward to in the Hub’s 2024 Accelerator programme.

Julie Harboe, business mentor, Denmark/Switzerland

Julie works between academia and practice. Her competences are grounded in visual arts, history, scientific method, and attention to societal developments. She is skilled in planning and managing projects, innovation workshops and knowledge-focused events, and has extensive experience in teaching and individual coaching.

I believe that digitalisation in education offers great chances for education as it enables sharing, various forms of collaboration, and global working opportunities, but it should place greater emphasis on knowledge production where the learner as a physical and creative person is in focus.

Julie has mentored four teams in the programme so far. She has been impressed by the solutions presented, and openness and concentration of the exchanges. Most of her input focused on the importance of physical and social interaction between the learners and the teachers and on how to reflect the impact of digital tools in a physical reality.

Solutions Julie would like to see

In the future, she would like to see more solutions that focus on the interaction between social/physical and social/digital learning spaces.

Mārtinš Bičevskis, business mentor, Latvia

Mārtinš has a background in law, but more recently he’s been a supervisory board member of several private and public institutions as well as of advisory boards of a few companies and investment funds. He has also worked as a mentor for start-ups and scale-ups (companies with an average annual growth rate greater than 20% over at least three years with 10 or more employees).

His expertise is in public-private partnerships, cooperation with policymakers, talent management, and corporate governance.

Mārtinš offers strong value to the Accelerator programme around lobbying and policy making, as well as giving practical advice on how to work with public institutions in the educational and technology fields: what perspectives to consider, what to prioritise, and what to expect.

Digitalisation creates opportunities for us to be faster and more global, and it’s just a question of how fast and deep digitalisation comes into education; it is an opportunity to move ahead to more individualised education. The best education in the future will be education for the unique person, not for the group. The question is who the forerunners will be.

Solutions Mārtinš would like to see

Mārtinš would like to see solutions in the future that stem from desire and personal experience and aim at fixing challenges in education.

Leonardo Rosario Andino, educational mentor, Italy

Leonardo has worked in the teaching profession in languages, philosophy and history, and as a coordinator of inclusion in education for ten years. Since his strengths lie in special education and inclusion, he’s mentored the teams on how to approach personalisation and communication – and how to interact with Italian institutions.

Digitalisation in education is like an ingredient in cooking: it must be used in the right amount. Too little can result in a relative functional illiteracy, whilst too much can result in cognitive impoverishment, isolation and passiveness. Overall, it has the potential to revolutionise learning environments, making them more personalised, accessible and engaging.

Thanks to his mentoring of accelerator teams, he has learnt about other countries' pedagogical approaches and learning environments. He's also seen that AI is trending and is becoming involved in all solutions in the programme.

What Leonardo wants to see next

Leonardo is keen to see what advancements there have been with AI for the 2024 edition of the Hub's Accelerator programme!

Want to get involved?

Are you passionate about digital education? The European Digital Education Hub is a collaborative online community that provides a platform to share best practices, discuss and participate in activities related to digital education.