INTERACTIVE DIGITAL CONTENT PLATFORM TO SHARE, REUSE AND INNOVATE IN THE CLASSROOM Erasmus Project

Project Title

INTERACTIVE DIGITAL CONTENT PLATFORM TO SHARE, REUSE AND INNOVATE IN THE CLASSROOM

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 : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

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

Project Summary

Education and training system are key ingredients to leverage the European countries efforts to support growth, jobs, equity and social inclusion. Enhancing skills and competences of young people, so that they play an active role in society by integrating the labour market and achieve personal fulfillment, is a major issue for our countries. At the same time, dropout, early school leaving, lack of motivation, exclusion from knowledge, poor acquisition of competences are challenges that have to be tackled with the greatest efforts. In that context the European Commission has developed the Digital Education Action plan (https://education.ec.europa.eu/focus-topics/digital/education-action-plan) which acknowledges the need for digitally-competent and digitally–confident educators and education & training staff as well as for high quality educational content, user-friendly tools and secure platforms.
The INDIE project “INTERACTIVE DIGITAL CONTENT PLATFORM TO SHARE, REUSE AND INNOVATE IN THE CLASSROOM” has developed INDIeOpen (https://indieopen.upct.es), a platform that consists of an authoring tool which enables teachers to easily elaborate enriched digital learning units, and of a repository of Open Educational Resources (OER) where the created content can be shared, modified and reused. The INDIeOpen learning units can be either used as web resources or linked as external tools from any LTI compliant Learning Management System like Moodle. In the latter case, learning analytics panels are available both for the instructor to monitor the progress and engagement of his or her students with the content, and for the learners to help them driving their own learning process. The INDIe units are therefore valuable assets to allow the teacher to implement student centered methodologies like flipped class rooms or blended learning.
The INDIeOpen authoring tool presents a user friendly and visual interface, which makes the construction of units extremely easy, the author picks an activity from a wide range of interactive widgets and drops it into the unit he or she is building. It favors collaboration, because units can be modified by other authors using the same tool. A learning path editor is furthermore available to create sequences of units, for individualized learning paths.

The project was coordinated by the Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, Spain, through its Digital Content Production Centre. Other members of the Consortium were the Kauno Kolegija/ University of Applied Sciences from Lithuania, two regional authorities for education – the Dirección General De Atención a la Diversidad y Calidad Educativa, Murcia, Spain and the Directorate of Secondary Education, Levadia, Greece – three Spanish high schools from the Region of Murcia (IES Miguel de Cervantes, IES Elena, IES Valle de Leiva), two primary schools (2nd primary school and 7th primary school) and one high school (1st General Lyceum) from Levadia, Greece and a non-profit professional body: the Hellenistic Education Society of STEM.

Training on the INDIeOpen tool, but also on digital content creation, intellectual property, licenses and student centered methodologies was organized for teachers from the different partners. As as result, during the project’s life, close to 70 different authors have created more than 200 learning units, in Spanish, Greek or English, in a range of topics and levels, from primary school to university, including vocational training and adult education. Those units have been intensively used in the classrooms of the partners schools or universities, some as supporting materials for blended learning and others as material for self-study. All the partners have access to INDIeOpen beyond the duration of the project, which means that new units are actively being created and used. In the case of the Regional Authority for Education of the Region of Murcia, a customized version of INDIeOpen will be adopted for digital content creation by many more schools and teachers.

The INDIeOpen platform was one of the 21 finalists in the 2021 edition of the IMS Global Learning Impact Awards (http://content.imsglobal.org/learning-impact-report-2021/learning-impact-report-2021/), an international competition organized by the world-leading non-profit collaborative advancing edtech interoperability, innovation, and learning impact with more than 700 member organizations, http://www.imsglobal.org/. It was also finalist of the 2021 “Good Practices” of the SIMO educación fair, the greatest Edtec Spanish fair (https://www.educaciontrespuntocero.com/simo-educacion/experiencias-simo-educacion-2021/)

Finally, the INDIeOpen platform is further evolved by the Erasmus Plus project INDIe4All (https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/projects/eplus-project-details/#project/2020-1-ES01-KA201-083177), to ensure that the learning units are accessible for students with special educational needs, in particular for visually impaired learners.

Project Website

http://indieproject.eu

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 334828 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSIDAD POLITECNICA DE CARTAGENA & Country: ES

Project Partners

• 7th Primary School of Levadia
• 1ST GENERAL LYCEUM OF LEVADIA
• Diefthinsi Defterovathmias Ekpaidefsis Viotias
• REGION DE MURCIA
• Hellenic Education Society of STEM
• INSTITUTO de ENSEÑANZA SECUNDARIA MIGUEL de CERVANTES MURCIA
• KAUNO KOLEGIJA