As stated in the original application, we (still) strongly believe that "the quality of an education system depends on the quality of its teachers" (Teaching in Focus Brief 2, OECD, 2012) and therefore educators are at the centre of our work. The InDO project aimed to make inclusive frameworks such as Understanding by Design and Differentiated Instruction more accessible to higher education teachers and trainers. It sought to achieve this by providing four main resources: an online course, a compendium of template activities, an app listing digital resources, and a policy recommendation document. The project's goal was to empower educators to put technological solutions at the service of pedagogy and to enrich their teaching plans and resources. This was also meant to proactively address student diversity and inclusion through the resources developed, and to optimise the relevance and effectiveness for educators across Europe. To achieve this, the project aimed to increase the visibility of digital technologies in higher education and to support the integration of new teaching methods and learning tools, by providing examples and ideas distilled from literature, practice and first-hand experiences.
At the time when the InDO proposal was written, we found it interesting that - according to OECD data - only 38% of recent entrants to the education sector believed their school/college to be adept at adopting innovations, new knowledge or methods (Innovating Education and Educating for Innovation, OECD, 2016). Through InDO we wanted to support educators to rise to the challenge, helping them transform their teaching methods by providing actionable knowledge and frameworks. According to the Digital Education Action Plan (2021 – 2027), fostering the development of a high-performing digital education ecosystem and enhancing digital skills and competences for the digital transformation are the strategic priorities. The InDO project had the main objective of supporting the upskilling of educators in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) through high-quality learning content and user-friendly tools, providing guidance on how to think of them and how to incorporate them in teaching practices. We were driven by the promising idea of blending the approaches of Understanding by Design (UbD) and Differentiated Instruction (DI), as they were already known in other levels of education but they were never specifically applied to the HE sector.