Digital Resources: Supply, Intermediations, Networks in UIT – RENOIR-IUT

Innovative since their creation in 1966, the IUT (University Institutes of Technology) constitute a privileged field for observing the transformations of higher education. This capacity for innovation relies upon on the necessary relationships between academia and the professional world, particularly in order to develop and provide operational knowledge. These relationships are reflected in national educational programmes (PPN), co-constructed with the economic sector. The training also includes tutored projects and internships with a variety of trainers (academics, professionals, secondary school teachers...).

The RENOIR-IUT project (Digital resources: supply, intermediation, networks in the University Institutes of Technology) has three interrelated scientific objectives:
1) Characterizing the interactions between the actors involved in the production of educational resources in the context of a strong demand for professionalization. In other words, understanding the complexity of how resources are produced from national programmes (PPN), taking into account the evaluation processes.
2) Analysing the global offer of educational resources and its effects in terms of mediation and relation to knowledge. This work will be done first by the elaboration of a cartography, then by producing a typology from a socio-economic perspective (creation, extraction and distribution of value). The forms of mediation chosen by the designers are sometimes accompanied by promises to users. Escort forms and escort discourses will be analyzed.
3) Establishing models for the selection, design and transformation of resources, resource systems and their evolution. In the research literature, the practices of higher education teachers with and about resources are poorly documented. The aim of the project is to model these practices and to analyse the way teachers organise their resource systems.

In an exploratory and comprehensive perspective, the purpose of this work is to put these three approaches (didactic, socio-economic and educational) in tension. Crossing the results of these approaches is required to study the educational resources and the ecosystems that produce and exchange these resources. This research will cover the field of instrumental practices in IUT, from the development of national programmes, through the analysis of resource design processes and their use, to the ultimate processes of professionalization.
Understanding the specificities of training requires developing methods to study them. The methodology of the RENOIR-IUT project is based on the constitution of different corpus resulting from document collections and field surveys (observations, interviews). Discourses, techno-semiotic, qualitative and quantitative analyses will be conducted. Empirical studies will be conducted for 7 specialties. The study is devoted to first-year courses, which are considered to be at the heart of the profession, tutored projects and cross-curricular teaching (statistics).