Today, digital technology penetrates almost every field of daily life in private or public sphere. Thus, education and training institutions in Europe, from kindergartens to universities, are encouraged to use digital technologies in creative, collaborative and efficient ways. These efforts are reinforced by the European Commission’s recently adopted Digital Education Action Plan (DEAP, EC, 2018) supporting technology-use and digital competence development in education, as well as by the European Framework for Digitally Competent Educational Organisation (DigCompOrg, EC, 2015). The TASK 21 project aims to help modernise the design of formal educational curricula and pedagogical material that respond to 21st century needs. To achieve this, the project will design, pilot and implement an interdisciplinary, blended university course “EdTech and Ai for essential Skills of the 21st century” for: - future educators and curriculum designers: students of Educational Science, Educational Psychology, Pedagogy, and similar programmes; - future e-learning developers: students of IT profiles (Information Technology, Computer Science, and similar) Through field-specific and interdisciplinary modules, the students should learn to design (and deliver) curricula and pedagogical material which should: - be digital or digitally enhanced and reap the potential of AI and emerging technologies through adaptive learning - be transparent and modular (available across educational systems, offering mutually recognisable qualifications) - equip learners with transversal skills necessary to thrive in a fast-changing world: o Digital Literacy (for learning and working in innovative learning environments) o Communication, collaboration (supporting learning and working with others) o Creativity, innovation (encouraging creative learning) o Autonomous learning (fostering independent learning) o Information literacy (supporting effective ways of thinking) To set the example, the course itself will be digitally reinforced, adaptive, modular, focused on developing learners’ transversal skills, and will offer mutually recognisable qualifications as it will be piloted by HEI in 4 European countries: France (Pôle universitaire Léonard de Vinci), Italy (University of Catania), Portugal (Universidade Lusófona) and Norway (Oslo Metropolitan University) in cooperation with two EdTech partners: NetPort Science Park from Sweden and Claned from Finland, and 8 associated partners. The course will be embedded into the Claned adaptive learning platform, which allows the creation of personalised learning paths for each student. The platform’s recommendation engine provides opportunities for enhancing the learning experience. Based on semantic analysis of content, learning data, collaboration and sharing, the platform identifies individual learning characteristics and matches them with the most suitable content for the learner. Students can also upload material or create content themselves. The platform also returns the real-time data back to teachers through analytics that gives them insights into the factors influencing learning. It also gives them the power to modify these factors - intervene before failure or drop-outs occur - as well as give assistance to students needing support or lacking challenge. To encourage continuous professional development of educators, the course will also be available in a MOOC format as a self-paced, self-learning e-learning tool for teachers at SE and HE level, as well as for IT developers specialised in e-learning. After designing the methodology and the pedagogical material in 2019/2020, the consortium will test the course with the first generation of students, optimise it and adjust it for the MOOC format, then test the optimised version with another generation of students. The piloting of the course should entail between 900 and 1000 students in total across four countries in academic years 2020/21 and 2021/22. After the piloting period, “EdTech and Ai for essential Skills of the 21st century” should be introduced into the course catalogues of the HEI involved as a 5-credit elective course. To multiply the course benefits across Europe, the consortium will put in place a range of online and on-the-spot dissemination activities, including 3 conferences for HEI (to encourage course replication) and 2 workshops for educators. By 2027, the course “EdTech and Ai for essential Skills of the 21st century” is expected to reach and improve the competences for creating 21st curricula of: - 3000 HEI students via the university course; - 600 – 1000 educators via the MOOC.
We looked at contributing to enhancing the future teachers’ knowledge and skills in using digital technologies as digital tools to create high-quality pedagogical material and to use active methodologies more adequate to the current needs of students in the 21st century.
In the education field, there is a lack of knowledge on how technologies can be used to create pedagogical material. There is also a lack of digital skills in current and future teachers. TASK 21 aims to help modernize the design of formal educational curricula and pedagogical material that respond to 21st-century needs. Pedagogical knowledge plus IT knowledge (AI) equals Creating a HE module. The set of needs leads us to the following conclusions: 1. students and teachers have knowledge about the use of technologies that is still very restricted to the individual level of users; 2. there are high expectations about the use of technologies in an educational context and a clear understanding of these needs to meet the pedagogical purposes of the teaching and learning process; 3. students have little knowledge about AI, but consider that it can have a high impact on learning; 4. there is an imminent need for learning more focused on the active role of students; 5. there is an equal need to adapt the curriculum to the needs of the current historical context and the world of work.