Digital Competences Unleashed: Education and Training of Digital Competences in the era of CoVid-19 Erasmus Project

Project Title

Digital Competences Unleashed: Education and Training of Digital Competences in the era of CoVid-19

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Inclusion – equity

Project Summary

Information literacy and digital competences must be considered as a fundamental competency like the ability to read, write and calculate. The UNESCO (Catts & Lau) considers it “a basic human right” while the ALA (American Library Association) calls it a “survival skill in the information age”. In the digital era, information literacy and digital competences are a social key competence in technology-enhanced learning settings as well as in educational/professional environments. This holds especially true during the CoVID-19 pandemic, where on short notice a sudden shift from conventional face-to-face teaching and learning to digital online teaching and learning took place. This shift poses challenges especially for lecturers/teachers as well as (teacher-)students, who have to suddenly orient themselves in a completely new situation of teaching and learning.

In the DIGIVID project, we focus on the education of lecturers, in-service teachers and teacher-students (= our target groups) at universities and Teacher Colleges in Austria, Germany and Norway, to educate them to become information literate and digital-savvy to ensure high-level teaching and learning quality in online teaching and learning environments.

To do so, our objectives of the project are as follows: We will develop the DIGIVIDget, a widget that presents the DIGIVID online teaching and learning curriculum based upon the European Digital Competence Framework for Citizens (DigComp 2.1) and the European Digital Competence Framework for Educators (DigCompEdu) in a sophisticated way. DIGIVID empowers lecturers, teachers and teacher-students to learn time and place-independent on their mobile devices or on (desktop-)PCs to prepare them for the demands of today’s information society and working contexts caused by the CoVID-19 pandemic w.r.t. online teaching and learning. Furthermore, we will develop a generally applicable evaluation framework, with which we can effectively and efficiently measure the knowledge gain w.r.t. the DIGIVID curriculum and its impact on online teaching and learning. The framework includes guidelines, tools and instruments that can be used for any formative as well as summative evaluation of technology enhanced learning interventions established in a digital learning environment.

With the DIGIVID project, our target groups consist of lecturers, in-service teachers and teacher-students and to offer them an easy-to-use way on how to deal with the challenges resulting from the CoVID-19 pandemic. We plan user studies (approx. 1000 participants) as well as online training activities (with 15 lecturers and 15 in-service teachers) to introduce the DIGIVID approach in our targeted learning environments. Through these training activities and the application of the DIGIVID approach in lectures and class, we see especially teacher-students as super-spreaders for DIGIVID. Furthermore, within our three multiplier events (30 stakeholders each), we plan to increase the project’s visibility and attract people in using DIGIVID outside the consortium partners. Additionally, with the support of our associated partners (both are strongly related to the Austrian education system) we aim to spread the DIGIVID idea and results in order to raise the visibility of the approach within the target group and also reach stakeholders in other educational settings.

All project activities follow i) a co-design and innovation approach (DIGIVIDget, content, evaluation framework), ii) GDPR and responsible research and innovation (RRI) rules, and iii) will be accompanied by thoroughly applied formative and summative evaluations (mixed-methods).

The impact we envisage is to educate educators and teacher-students to become information literate and digital-savvy in order to keep the quality of education high in online teaching and learning settings. We expect an increase in the digital competences of the participants after learning with the DIGIVIDget as well as increased confidence in applying online teaching strategies and carrying out motivating and inclusive online teaching activities. Based on this, we also expect an enhancement of the quality of participants’ online teaching and learning which further impacts on their (future) students’ learning in online environments. Moreover, we imagine that our approach could be also used beyond classical educational settings as the wider uptake of digital competences is also relevant in the domain of adult education and organisational training to foster the competitiveness of the European research and industry. By making the DIGIVIDget publicly available we aim to reach a broad audience across Europe and impact on the digital competences of not only European educators, but European citizens in general.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 187943 Eur

Project Coordinator

TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAET GRAZ & Country: AT

Project Partners

• NORGES TEKNISK-NATURVITENSKAPELIGE UNIVERSITET NTNU
• TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAET DRESDEN
• UNIVERSITAET GRAZ