Supporting the Development and Certification of the Digital Competences of Educators Erasmus Project

Project Title

Supporting the Development and Certification of the Digital Competences of Educators

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 higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Open and distance learning; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

Technology has long impacted education. There are several publications dedicated to the fields of edtech, technology enhanced learning and digital education. The technologies themselves run the gamut from simple classroom technologies such as projectors and audience-response systems, to augmented reality, artificial intelligence and simulation technology. With the advent of each new technology come predictions of fundamental changes in education. Yet few of these changes have been realized. Digital learning may indeed be the technology that breaks that pattern, but this will only come to pass if educators are empowered to take advantage of the technologies and methodologies available to them.

European HE in the Humboldtian tradition is based around the acquisition of knowledge through the conflict of ideas using the scientific method, of which a key part is truly independent academics acting as a college. Thus, the focus of our application is to strengthen the digital competence at the core of the educational profession, i.e. in the person and expertise of the educator. This sentiment is echoed by the European Parliament, whose recent report on education in the digital era stresses that teachers and trainers should be at the core of the digital transformation and therefore require adequate initial preparation and continuous training, which must include modules on age- and development-oriented teaching practices.

Therefore, the main objective of EdDiCo is to empower individual educators to:
(a) identify the potential technology holds to transform and improve their teaching strategies;
(b) identify the digital competences they would need to acquire to make the improvements identified;
(c) find the learning opportunities and resources suitable to acquire those competences.

The project is segmented into:
Phase 1. Creating an Organisational Paradigm for digital education training content (O1 & O2).
Competence Frameworks provide a list of skills which are needed for digital educators. However, a host of different competence frameworks exist at European, national and sectoral levels, and these do not always have the appropriate level of granularity to be useful for designing micro-learning experiences for educators. Therefore, these two outputs focus on extracting a set of useful descriptors for digital education, which will involve description along three levels, namely:
– different dimensions of competence
– each described in terms of knowledge, skills, autonomy and responsibility, and
– expressed at different levels of achievement.

Phase 2. Identifying High Quality digital education training content (O3).
This phase will see the identification of 500 high-quality micro-learning opportunities and open educational resources which educators can use to acquire digital competences using. Each opportunity and resource will be quality assured for inclusion in the database, using a methodology which will give particular weight to (a) the provenance of the resources, and (b) the ‘packaging’ of the resources as on-demand course experiences, e.g. through instruments such as MOOCs. Critically, each resource will also be tagged by the dimension / competence / level of achievement system developed in O1 and O2, allowing educators to target the specific skills they wish to acquire.

Phase 3. Creating tools to enable educators to find and utilise relevant content (O4)
This involves creating self-assessment and recommendation tools which will allow educators to self-assess their current digital competence, target a desired level of achievement, and receive a tailored recommendation in the form of a list of micro-learning opportunities and resources which will allow them to bridge their personal digital skills gap.

The project is squarely targeted at educators, but the benefits of it should be felt by all educational stakeholders, most concretely, students, who will benefit from faster adoption of digital pedagogies for their learning. It will be implemented by a consortium of Higher Education research institutions (UNIR, TUNI, DHBW and VMU) together with NGOs (FPM, Stifterverband) and a knowledge transfer organisation (KIC), all of whom have already been actively promoting open education, virtual mobility and the development of short learning programmes that produce widely recognisable credentials.

The simple yet ambitious aim of this initiative to create the largest resource for digital teacher education in Europe. By achieving this scale, the project should be able to benefit from network effects, which in turn creates a self-reinforcing cycle of increasing usage, leading to long-term sustainability.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 439883 Eur

Project Coordinator

Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg Heilbronn & Country: DE

Project Partners

• KNOWLEDGE INNOVATION CENTRE (MALTA) LTD
• FONDAZIONE POLITECNICO DI MILANO
• VYTAUTO DIDZIOJO UNIVERSITETAS
• Stifterverband
• TAMPEREEN KORKEAKOULUSAATIO SR
• UNIVERSIDAD INTERNACIONAL DE LA RIOJA SA