CONECTA is a teaching innovation project developed at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC) that acts as a complementary and extended activity to the training, capacity-building and communication actions of the POWER project. The initiative translates POWER’s educational principles into the formal university curriculum, reinforcing students’ competencies in critical communication, sustainability literacy and responsible engagement with energy-related narratives.
The project involves a large and diverse group of lecturers and students from Communication studies, Fine Arts, and other related creative, digital and social disciplines. Through this multidisciplinary approach, CONECTA fosters cross-fertilisation between perspectives, methodologies and expressive forms, strengthening students’ ability to communicate complex sustainability and energy transition issues to different audiences.
CONECTA is implemented across six undergraduate and postgraduate courses during the 2025–26 academic year, using the energy transition as a central case study due to its scientific complexity, social relevance and exposure to misinformation. Students work with real-world cases, analysing narratives, identifying misleading frames and co-creating open educational resources (OER/REAs) that address sustainability, renewable energy and disinformation from a critical and evidence-based perspective.
From a project perspective, CONECTA aligns primarily with WP3: Training Development, Piloting, and Capacity Building, as it operationalises experiential and interactive learning scenarios inspired by POWER’s methodology within higher education teaching. At the same time, it contributes to WP4: Communication, Dissemination, and Awareness Raising, by generating reusable educational materials, fostering public-facing outputs and strengthening the dissemination of responsible communication practices on energy and sustainability.
A distinctive feature of CONECTA is its bottom-up, participatory pedagogical model, which positions students as active knowledge producers rather than passive recipients. The project emphasises collaborative work, open science principles, and external validation, ensuring that the materials produced are not only academically sound but also socially relevant and transferable to other educational and communication contexts.
By the end of the academic cycle, CONECTA will deliver a set of co-created open educational resources, shared through open repositories and available for reuse by educators, students and practitioners. In doing so, the project extends the impact of POWER beyond individual training activities, contributing to structural curricular innovation, long-term capacity building and the formation of responsible communicators capable of addressing sustainability and energy challenges in a critical, ethical and inclusive manner.
Through this integration, CONECTA strengthens the ecosystem of educational, communication and engagement actions surrounding POWER, reinforcing its objectives of combating disinformation, promoting informed public debate and advancing a socially responsible energy transition.
Below, an example of a multimedia report developed by students is presented, while the complete repository of materials produced within the project can be accessed through the Climate Warriors initiative: https://climatewarriors.eu
