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 in the next decades. 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, Open Education and Open Educational Ressources, powered by e-learning, together with teaching methods that take full advantage of technology to achieve the learner’s engagement, will play a major role. The INDIE project “INTERACTIVE DIGITAL CONTENT PLATFORM TO SHARE, REUSE AND INNOVATE IN THE CLASSROOM” aims, on the one hand, at pushing forward significantly the creation of digital instructional contents for school education, and on the other hand, at fostering the sharing and reuse of these online learning units, by preparing a repository where teachers can browse, search, rate units, and link them easily from their own e-learning system. This will help teachers implementing student-centred learning methods, in order to increase the student engagement to drive her or his own learning process. It builds upon an authoring tool, which, through a rather simple syntax, allows authors to transform their content definition file into web documents powered by HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. The generated learning units will moreover incorporate gamification (badges, missions, leaderboard, etc..) and allow for learning analytics monitoring. The project is coordinated by the Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, through its Digital Content Production Centre. Other members of the Consortium are 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 y 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. The project will firstly evolve the authoring tool from its current research version to a production version, for use by a broader community. Training will then be provided to authors from the different partners, which will collaboratively create rich interactive learning units using the authoring tool. The training will combine a short-term joint staff meeting with online material and webinars. It will also include training on new teaching methodologies like flipped classroom, blended learning, etc. Some of the generated learning units will be in Spanish, others in Greek and others in English, and a variety of topics and level will be covered. The first courses that will be available online will be an introduction to the authoring tool itself, and aspects related to digital content creation like copyright and the proper use of licenses. During the learning contents creation by the authors, the repository will be developed where authors can upload the units generated by the authoring tool, and teachers (users) can browse, rate, search for, and comment the published units, select the units they are interested in and link them easily from their e-learning platform. A pilot will then be organized, where teachers of the partner schools implement student-centred methods in their classrooms, using the rich learning units of the repository. Surveys will be conducted in the different phases of the project, to collect feedback from authors regarding the authoring tool and the repository, from teachers regarding the repository and the learning units, and from pupils, about their perception of the new teaching methodologies. Under coordination of the two regional authorities for education, plans will be elaborated to prepare for a broader adoption beyond the duration of the project, which will include official calls for content creation, training programs etc… Finally, multiplier events will be organized in the final part of the project to present the results and output to a greater audience of schools, teachers and political representatives. Upon completion, an open source authoring tool will be available to create rich learning material, authors will have been trained and will have collaboratively created learning units, published in an open repository, and linkable from any standard e-learning platform. Furthermore, plans for further adoption and creation of a community of authors and teachers will be put into action, ensuring that more contents are uploaded, and more students benefit from the project results.
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.