The COVID-19 pandemic shed light on the general insufficient readiness of schools and teachers to move to distance, online-based teaching and learning practices. One of the difficulties faced was finding free appropriate learning applications and ready-to-use digital content suitable for the local curricula. Another challenge was many teachers’ lack of competency in planning, designing, and conducting digital classroom activities, or the experience in instructional design and digital content creation. The Design-CT project aims at supporting schoolteachers, of all grade levels and with various digital competency proficiency levels, to become authors and designers of pedagogically-sound blended- and digital-lessons and resources. The Design-CT Ecosystem is co-created, tested, validated and evaluated by teachers. The ecosystem is integrated onto the Lernwelt platform (http://www.lernwelt.biz/) . It extends the platform features and already available content repository and puts together the different project results. The Design-CT Ecosystem embodies teacher and peer-to-peer training programmes, design kits with digital lessons’ scenarios supported with templates and worked-out examples, and an authoring tool providing smart system-support for the creation of kits, lessons and resources. More specifically, the Design-CT project offers six teacher and peer-to-peer training programmes available in English, French, German, Greek and Portuguese, and co-designed with and for teachers of diverse digital competency profiles: beginner, advanced and proficient users of educational technology. Furthermore, the Design-CT Ecosystem provides an authoring tool with smart support and recommendations for content creation which facilitates the conversion of traditional learning content into a digital one. For instance, it allows for a text or scanned document to be automatically transformed into well-designed digital teaching units with multimedia and online tools support. The ecosystem also supports the implementation of a semi-automated gamification tool, that generates individual and group gamified challenges from imported text with questions and answers. The authoring tools’ smart recommendation feature uses the lessons’ templates and a library of multimedia resources and pedagogically selected tools to support teachers in modifying and creating lessons suitable for their grade level, subject domain and selected learning scenario. The aim of the Design-CT project is to produce 45 Design-CT Kits with pedagogically designed and selected scenarios, tools and templates, and 150 exemplary lessons that teachers can readily re-use, re-purpose and implement in their teaching practices. Supported by the authoring tool, the content of the kits can be translated into any language, eliminating the language barrier in sharing and re-using educational resources. The Design-CT project is designed to extend and support existing systems used by educational organizations. The ecosystem and its elements can be shared in whole or in part on most external systems, including learning management systems and content repositories. The Design-CT consortium will involve at least 48 teachers, from all school levels of the partner countries and with different digital competency profiles, in the direct co-creation and initial evaluation processes of the project outputs. Those teachers, forming the core of the Design-CT Cells, and supported by the project partners, will train and support at least 200 teachers in their schools and regions on the Design-CT approach and ecosystem. As the project teachers’ dissemination activities are designed around the train-the-trainer concept, the Design-CT Cells and P2P Cells (peer-to-peer) are expected to be self-sustaining community of practitioners, exponentially increasing the number of its participants, promoting and implementing innovative pedagogy and tools for the creation of high-quality digital content. The Design-CT consortium aims at reaching out to at least 600 teachers, 100 schools and 30 educational organizations and networks in Europe and beyond. With the flexibility of the Design-CT Ecosystem, its possible integration into available systems, and inclusiveness of all schoolteachers regardless of their digital proficiency, the Design-CT project is expected to have a great impact on schools’ digitization and teachers’ professional development. The Design-CT project has the potential to advance the integration of smart technologies in the education sector, supporting transnational cooperation and overcoming language barriers. More importantly, the project is inclusive to all teachers supporting them to become designers and creators of their own pedagogically sound blended- and digital- lessons and resources with minimal effort and time.
The Design-CT project aims at supporting schoolteachers, of all grade levels and with various digital competency proficiency levels, to become authors and designers of pedagogically sound blended- and digital- lessons and resources. The project builds on the existing repositories for digital content, extending them with a state-of-the-art AI-supported authoring tool with integrated Express GPT functions, allowing for easy digital content creation by the teachers, automated designs and content translations, content publishing, and reuse, as well as social evaluation of the digital resources to assure quality and curriculum alignment. The ready-to-use Design-CT Kits, co-created by experts and teachers, facilitate the creation of digital content through didactical templates for digital lessons. Finally, the Training Programmes empower teachers to implement innovative pedagogical approaches and design their own digital and blended lessons. The project also fosters the transfer and dissemination of best practices in school education, training teachers to become innovation leaders and multipliers and supporting them in implementing the new vision and instruments into their daily teaching practice.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced schools and teachers to move from “traditional” face-to-face classroom activities to distance, online-based teaching in the shortest period of time. In order to make this transition possible, teachers had to screen and select digital learning applications and content available for their subject domain, integrate and deliver them online using communication and collaboration software. In each of these tasks, teachers have encountered considerable challenges, due to the lack of competencies and experience in preparing and delivering online lessons and the lack of ready-to-use, curriculum-aligned digital learning resources. The Design-CT project responded to these challenges by delivering an innovative pedagogical and technical framework for digital school education, fostering teachers’ didactical and digital competencies.