DATALIT– Data Literacy at the interface of higher education and business

‘Data Literacy at the interface of higher education and business – DATALIT’
co-funded by Erasmus + Knowledge of Alliances

The Lithuanian Confederation of Industrialists participates in the international consortium of DATALIT project, co-funded by Erasmus+ Knowledge Alliances (No. 612561-EPP-1-2019-1-IT-EPPKA2-KA).

Nowadays data literacy is widely considered a critical skill to have in the 21st century. It can be defined as the ability to read, work with, analyze, and argue with data, in order to derive meaningful information and knowledge. Employees with data literacy skills have become highly valuable in today’s economy and labor market: more than ever before, employers demand some degree of data literacy from all employees, regardless of the professional role. Since data are used in a multitude of domains, data literacy is today an essential skill also for professionals like journalists, policy makers, etc. It is also a powerful enabler of civic engagement, as it empowers individuals and communities to keep governments transparent and accountable, tackle local issues, and navigate their own data ecosystems.

The project DATALIT aims at:

offering to university students across different Faculties, the opportunity to reach a suitable level of data knowledge that they can use and apply appropriately and diversely throughout their personal and professional lives,
Narrowing the gap between business and academia and putting EU enterprises in direct contact with potential future employees or business partners properly trained to exploit data effectively

To meet this challenge, DATALIT will develop and pilot an approach based on a long- term partnership of academia, business and educational partners. After an in-depth research phase, aimed at identifying best practices and experiences of data literacy inclusion in EU higher education and to better understand the needs and expectations of the target groups (students, HE professionals, employers), the partners will define a common understanding of data literacy as competence and design a syllabus to orient the creation of data courses. In parallel, the partners will develop a digital learning environment to integrate the class- based courses and a sound validation and certification system connected to the EQF, ECTS and EUROPASS systems. The outputs developed will be piloted by the Universities involved and by students that will have the opportunity to apply their data skills through internship experiences in EU enterprises.

Partners in the project:
1.    The National Research Council (CNR), Italy (The Coordinator)
2.    Evodevo, Italy
3.    Dataninja, Italy
4.    Smart Revolution, Italy
5.    Q21, Germany
6.    Blinc, Germany
7.    University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE), Germany
8.    Vilnius University (VU), Lithuania
9.    Lithuanian Confederation of Industrialists (LPK), Lithuania
10. Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (UNL), Portugal
11. Inova, Portugal
12. Novi Sad, Serbia
13. PanonIT, Serbia
14. Universiteti Europian i Tiranes (UET), Albania

Project duration: January, 2020 – December, 2021

For more information about the project please go to The Project’s website: http://datalit.pa.itd.cnr.it/

Contact Person at The Lithuanian Confederation of Industrialists:
Rasa Rotomskienė rasa.rotomskiene@lpk.lt