Nowadays, digital technology is permeating practically everybody’s life and introducing substantial changes is the way people learn, communicate to each other and relate to information. However, when this technology is used in education, students are typically positioned as consumers. In our work as teachers, we try not to see students as empty vessels ready to take the knowledge and skills we supposedly transmit to them. We consider them as able to direct their own learning process, think critically, take responsibility for their own learning, and take into account other positions.

Our way of understanding students’ authentic learning (Laur, 2013) and the need of deeply and sustainably transform teaching and learning practice in higher education institutions, led us to two fundamental decisions. 1) Taking into account research that helps to understand the complexities of educational change (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009; Sancho & Alonso, 2012; Collinson & Cook, 2013). Educational change can only be achieved by involving teachers and students in the decision-making process and anchoring new practices in the most promising aspects of teachers’ professional knowledge. 2) Promoting an innovation project to deeply and sustainably transforming teaching and learning practice, as well as providing scalability guidelines to foster the development of key competences, in particular, the digital competence. The project that we are presenting pays attention both to informal and formal learning (Sangrà & Wheeler, 2013).

Over three years, the DIYLab project (Do it yourself in Education: expanding digital competence to foster Student agency and collaborative learning- European Commision. Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency. 543177-LLP-1-2013-1-ES-KA3MP), seeks to explore the changes and its educational effects occurring in the last decade regarding digital competencies, especially in relation to the emergence of a culture of collaboration that connects youth learning, technology and DIY (Kafai & Peppler, 2011). This project is being implemented in Spain, Finland and the Czech Republic.

Young people’s efforts to create and disseminate digital media have been associated with the growing DIY movement (Spencer, 2005). Starting in the ‘90s (McKay, 1998) with arts, crafts and new technologies (Eisenberg & Buechley, 2008; Knobel, & Lankshear, 2010). It is now considered in curricula (Guzzetti, Elliott & Welsch, 2010) giving educators and students the opportunity to create, share and learn in collaboration (Williams & Cernochová, 2013).

The DIYLab project will develop a DIYLabHub to promote student engagement by proposing collaborative, meaningful and authentic learning experiences that can be sustainable and expandable after the end of the project. This will foster a network to share project’s processes and results to other higher education institutions. This practice will depend on the use and implementation of different technologies (video editing software, mobile/flexible applications, etc.) and the dissemination and construction of a DIY community (Kafai & Peppler, 2011) in an open on-line platform.

All of this, in line with the importance of developing certain skills such as learning how to learn, autonomy, personal initiative, responsibility, creativity, etc. Equally, with theories of social constructivism, learning constructionism, connectivism or emergent pedagogies that arise around the use of ICT in education and aim to take advantage of its communicative, interactive, creative and innovative potential in a new generation/culture of learning (Adell & Castañeda, 2012; Area & Pesson, 2012; Aguaded & Cabero, 2014).

The main aim of the first stage is to identify what participant institutions recognize as the best or the most adequate practices in developing key competences and especially DIYLab related ones. In this paper, we focus on the objective of identifying the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, difficulties and challenges to implement the project in the Pedagogy, Primary School, Infant School Teacher and Social Education degrees of the UB.

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