ICT is an innovation sector that drives economic growth and job creation. Its’ high growth is a result of the rapid development of networks, which fuels both the demand and supply for digital services. Universities have a responsibility to modernize their educational practices for developing highly skilled ICT professionals capable of putting ideas into action. Building the innovation capacity of ICT students is crucial because: it benefits individuals by building knowledge and skills for pursuing successful careers in a highly evolving sector; it builds a highly skilled workforce; it contributes to community wellbeing through services that address industry and societal issues.Design thinking is an innovation building framework that introduces solutions that better address needs through a process of empathy that allows designers to better understand the experiences and feeling of users. Design thinking enables the definition of more accurate problem statements and encourages brainstorming for building and validating solutions that work, even when none appears to exist at first glance. ICT-INOV aims to enrich ICT higher education in Asia, and specifically Malaysia, Vietnam, Nepal, and Pakistan, for promoting innovation. Implementation in South Asia is important due to the region’s high growth. While educational objectives in these Partner Countries may differ, they all converge to the need of enriching higher education as a vehicle of innovation and growth. ICT-INOV aims to introduce a technology-enhanced, design thinking learning intervention for contributing to the development of an ICT workforce highly capable of innovation. The project will produce:- An design thinking, experiential learning framework for innovation- Physical labs and digital services for promoting collaboration in design thinking - Educational activities that integrate design thinking- Instructor training and community building towards the adoption of design thinking in ICT education

Because of globalization, standardization leading to accreditation of academic programs has become an increasingly dominant theme in higher education. In order to achieve it, there are various challenges faced by Asian partner country Higher Education Institutions, which resulted in creating the motivation towards undertaking this project. The partner countries face the challenge of strong competition with international institutions because of the easy and wide access to higher education abroad. The institutions can not delay any further to address it, otherwise they risk the severe issues of comparability of quality of education locally and abroad, and other issues relating to recognition of qualification. Moreover, the increased proportion of students entering university-level education has increased the complexity of higher education systems across the entire partner countries, thereby also giving rise to the need of standardization and accreditation. In spite of huge student population in Asia, unfortunately very few universities from Asia are seen in good positions in global world ranking of universities.

Traditional learning methodologies based on passive transmission of information, fail to develop a set of competences that students require for their professional life and their relation with the surrounding Society. Therefore, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are required to modernize their pedagogical methodologies, moving into active learning processes whereby students engage in activities that promote higher order learning skills like analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Project and Problem-based learning (PBL) are active and learner-centred methodologies in which students develop their knowledge and competences by following a problem solving process, usually based on real-life situations. The identified benefits for engineering and technology students are considerable improvements in critical, lateral and creative thinking, problem solving strategies, intrinsic motivation, group collaboration, communication skills, entrepreneurship and integration with the society. Supporting active learning through ICT tools (virtual social communities, games and VR/AR simulations) creates Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) where the new technologically-savvy generation of students feels comfortable. The objective of the ALIEN (Active Learning In ENgineering education) project is thus to design, implement and validate an active learning methodology based on PBL (Project/Problem) environments addressing real-life issues related to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) concepts. The methodology will be supported by a VLE including a set of digital tools that will allow students to experiment, collaborate and communicate in an extended and multinational learning community that will also include other stakeholders like teachers and researchers.ALIEN’s expected impact includes the institutional strategical adoption of active learning as the primary pedagogical approach to education.