Various recent surveys among higher education faculty and school teachers on the European as well as various national levels have demonstrated the need for more high quality digital resouces to be used in higher education and school education. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic clearly revealed a specific skills gap for both HE faculty and school teachers alike when it comes to effectively using digital resources for online teaching. In the school sector, accessibily of digital resources has emerged as a particular concern. The project Digital Didactics in Art Education (DIDAE) will address these concerns by developing a digitial platform, also called DIDAE, which will provide an overview on easily accessible digital tools for art making. This includes digital tools for drawing, painting, sculpting, animation, augmented reality, video, photography, gaming and game development, graphic design, photo editing and photo manipulation, instructions for these tools and classroom assignments. The criteria to be used for selecting and creating new digital content in this field include: open access; data economy; clear user interface; low-threshold usability; data protection; online stability; different end devices, peer-to-peer learning among users; social inclusiveness and creative potential. This will ensure that users in HE and secondary school education will be able to easily access open educational resources which guarantee high educational quality, accessibility and inclusion. The primary target groups of the DIDAE project will be HE art education faculty, art education students studying to become art teachers, art teachers at secondary schools and pupils. The online platform will address the skills gap outined above by supporting the development of HE faculty’s and teachers’ digital didactic competences. The DIDAE platform will be designed as an open educatioinal resouce (OER) and according to the 2016 EU guideline on Web Accessibility. The project partners in DiDAE consist of Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (AT) - coordinator, Bern University of the Arts (CH), Moholy Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest (HU), Universtiy of Cologne (DE) and Willem de Kooning Academy from the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences (NL). Through a series of activies and events joining HE faculty teaching in secondary school teacher training programmes, advanced students in teacher training programmes and secondary school teachers, the partners will gather, classify, edit and newly created OER which will feed into the DIDAE platform.They will systematically consolidate the new knowledge in digital didactics for art making/artistice practice that has emerged as an ad-hoc response over the COVID-19 semester in spring/summer 2020 and ensure that this knowledge is not lost and will build on it so that as many HE educators, HE students and secondary school teachers will be able to benefit from it. The DIDAE platform will be created using the four languages Dutch, English, German and Hungarian to ensure a wide target audience accross Europe and beyond. The multilingual approach will also ensure that users from all over Europe will be able to profit from digital educational resources which were originally created e.g. in a language spoken by fewer people such as Hungarian. The DIDAE platform developed in this project will nourish the use of digital resources for art making both in the current pandic times when distance learning is a necessity as well as in post-pandemic times when students and teachers will have returned to physical classrooms. The partners maintain that using both physical and digital tools for art making will broaden the creative skills of pupils as well as art teachers. Moreover, digital education has many benefits beyond the needs created by COVID-19, e.g. by allowing students/pupils with special needs/health issues or other learners unable to attend physical classes equal participation in education, thus underlying the high potential of DIDAE for fostering various dimensions of inclusion.
The project “Digital Didactics in Art Education (DIDAE)” intended to address the needs outlined above by proposing to 1. Systematically collect existing online educational resources on artistic practice; 2. Complement existing resources with new educational content, 3. test, evaluate and classify both new and existing resources and 4. Set up a multilingual online platform DIDAE as a tool box for teaching artistic practice. The project partners wanted to create an easy to access and easy to use, quality assured and reliable online database for educators and students to support overcoming the challenges causedby Covid. In order to reach as many potential target audiences as possible, the DIDAE platform was to be available in Dutch, English, German, and Hungarian. Beyond the needs created by the pandemic, DIDAE envisioned to provide digital resources for art making in regular physical classwork, too as this broadens the creative skills of students as well as art teachers. Moreover, there are clear benefits of digital education for students with special needs/health issues or other barriers to attending physical classes. DIDAE was thus also designed to contribute to equal participation in education and to foster inclusion.
At the time of the project application, European higher education institutions and schools had just overcome the first “pandemic semester” characterized by a sudden need for high quality and free online educational resources, a lack of hardware, a lack of pedagogical experience with online teaching and scant technological support. Given that Covid cases were on the rise again in autumn 2020, it was clear that this need would not go away soon. While online teaching resources were difficult to come by in all subjects, in art education it was an even greater challenge to identify resources which were fit for purpose, functional, didactically sound, allowed free access and offered inclusive learning opportunities as well as low-threshold service. Faced with this situation, many art educators had started to collect online teaching resources. However, most of these ad-hoc collections were done in a hurry, without the resources to properly analyse and classify their content and thus without effective quality assessment. Therefore, these individual collections could not effectively address the medium and long-term needs of art educators and their students for online educational resources.