Enhancing Educational Effectiveness Through Transdisciplinary Practice: The ETCOP Model

Birgit Oberer, Alptekin Erkollar, Andreas Kropfberger

This paper presents the ETCOP Model, a transdisciplinary framework designed to enhance educational effectiveness through stakeholder co-design, critical reflexivity, and impact-oriented curriculum development. Developed by the ETCOP Institute, the model integrates educational science, digital innovation, and ethics, and has been applied across diverse domains including digital transformation training for SMEs, AI literacy in teacher education, and entrepreneurship education in secondary schools. Anchored in design-based research and structured around five core principles, the model promotes the use of open educational resources, modular learning architectures, and continuous, mixed-methods evaluation.

Empirical findings from internal and external assessments indicate increased learner engagement, competence acquisition, and evidence of institutional transformation. By operationalizing transdisciplinarity at the levels of pedagogy, governance, and evaluation, the ETCOP Model contributes a scalable, ethically grounded approach to educational design. The paper advances the field of transdisciplinary educational research by offering a practice-based model that supports systemic innovation and alignment with evolving societal and policy demands.

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