Project Description
CoLearn aims to develop higher education faculty’s digital competencies to advanced levels based on the standards provided in the EU DigCompEdu framework . The pedagogical and technological support necessary to create and sustain collaboration among faculty for collaborative course design and establishing professional networks will be designed. Faculty training resources and materials developed in the scope of the project will be shared through this website as open resources.
Three key dimensions that reflect the project objectives and outcomes are digital competence, online professional community, and open educational resources. Each dimension is detailed below.
Digital Competence
The COVID-19 global pandemic has dramatically changed and created significant challenges for higher education. Most notably, higher education faculty members were expected to transition their face-to-face classes to a remote/online modality almost overnight. This urgency highlighted the need for faculty to develop a more sophisticated set of digital competencies to adapt to the changing demands of teaching at the universities.
In order to support faculty members for such a transition, EU’s DigCompEdu framework provides objectives and principles to develop training programs designed to develop educators’ digital competencies. In addition to the key digital competence areas for educators, a taxonomy to assess their development is included in this framework. Based on this framework, training programs in this project will be prepared for five core digital competence areas: (a) Digital Resources (Area 2), (b) Teaching and Learning (Area 3), (c) Assessment (Area 4), and (d) Empowering Learners (Area 5).
Open Educational Resources
Opening educational resources refer to the removal or lowering of institutional barriers that prevent knowledge sharing. Open education enables and requires HEIs to engage in cross-border collaborations and partnerships, encouraged by the EU as a policy priority. Faculty training resources and materials developed in the scope of the project will be shared through this website as open resources. The European Framework of Open Education for HEIs will be followed while opening up these resources to public use.
Online Professional Community
Online professional communities allow educators to focus on mutually significant and complex professional problems; and develop collaborative solutions irrespective of location and physical distance. The typical /traditional approach to support faculty members in developing digital competencies has been dominently with training programs focusing primarily on developing technological skills or sharing digital resources created by experts. While such means of professional support are essential, they are not sufficient for developing advanced levels of digital competencies outlined by the EU’s digital competence for educators (DigCompEdu) framework. Professional learning communities, which afford the co-construction of professional knowledge, are considered very important for professional development and growth.
Based on such a rationale, in this project, participating faculty members will be provided with pedagogical and technological support while working on significant real design problems as teams. The digital environment which will be designed in the scope of this project will afford educators to collaborate online.