The Project
DigiSkills aims to bring together and further develop content, services, pedagogies and practices for lifelong learning in school/university/adult population, formulating specific scenarios of use of learning tools and platforms which will be tested with real users from eight countries (Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Greece, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK), and evaluated in terms of their impact, with a particular attention to institutional as well as pedagogical innovation and change.
This way, DigiSkills network aspires to address the necessity to develop an integrative approach in collecting and disseminating best practices that promote ICT enabled learning using innovative teaching and learning practices. To this end, a European network of all relevant actors (teachers and students in secondary education (SE), teachers and students in higher education (HE), parents, policy makers, adults returning to higher education, learners entering the workplace (AE) etc.) shall be formed and motivated through specific educational actions, contests, conferences and summer schools, to develop the competencies necessary in order to properly educate in digital competence and learning to learn skills and thus supporting the transition of Europe to a leading knowledge based economy12. Overall the project team that has a network of experts from the education, pedagogy and qualitative research fields aims to design and implement a methodological approach that will contribute to a systematic assessment of the impact of the ICT enabled learning both in terms of learning outcomes and learning activities and to the delivery of a series of recommendations for possible future actions.
Aims and Objectives
DigiSkills aims to serve as an accelerator of the sharing, adoption, usage, and re-purposing of the already rich existing eLearning resources. First of all, it will demonstrate ways to involve SE, HE and AE communities in innovative teaching and learning practices through the effective use of eLearning resources. It will promote community building between numerous educational institutions of Europe and empower them to use, share and exploit unique resources from a wealth of educational repositories, within meaningful educational activities. In addition, it will demonstrate the potential of eLearning resources to meet the educational and quality needs of these communities, supported by DigiSkills Inventory a social platform where teachers, students, parents and other community members will be able to discover, acquire, discuss and adapt eLearning resources on their topics of interest and also use e-assessment tools. Its basic aims can be summarized in the following:
1. To develop a detailed and systematic methodology to define the criteria for identifying the best practices (as identified in each partner) and then operate as the frame for the collection and formation of exceptional teaching and learning approaches with the view to provide/collect innovative teaching and learning practices.
2. To design and develop a web-based Inventory, which will include a collection and categorization of best practices that can support learning community and where users will be able to find, exchange and adapt innovative teaching and learning practices and exchange ideas and best practices.
3. To establish a constantly-expanding network of SE, HE and AE communities informed on the necessity of innovative teaching and learning practices and trained in effective use of ICT in teaching. This network shall operate in an independent way, with teachers supplying the educational material and ultimately being responsible for the preservation and further enhancement of the inventory and through Web2.0-based approaches and tools.
4. To collect and develop innovative, relevant and multilingual content that will support the proposed approach, which will be described and stored (in the form of learning objects) in the Inventory’s repository of content.
5. To develop ICT literacy skills and ensure the access to and use of innovative teaching and learning practices by the users under the umbrella of community building. Community building is critical component that will enable their success in learning programs by reducing isolation, mentoring success, transforming experiences of exclusion to ones of inclusion, offering encouragement and hope, and fostering group dialogue and peer learning from secondary to higher and adult education communities.
6. To carry out a set of pilot sessions with a number of representative user groups (teachers, students, parents, policy makers, adults returning to higher education, learners entering the workplace) in order to enrich/ localize/ adapt content to current needs and evaluate the proposed approach.
7. To perform an extended dissemination and validation of the project outcomes in a wide network across Europe, and to circulate effective teaching methods through networking with relevant projects, networks and initiatives.
1 Declaration by "DigitalEurope", available at: http://www.digitaleurope.org/index.php?id=1068&id_article=390
2 Open declaration on public services 2.0, available at: http://eups20.wordpress.com/the-open-declaration
