Universidade Portucalense is one of the partners in the Erasmus+ KA2 project “DigiComplex: The hybrid future of education. The digital skills we need to deal with the complexity”.
This project is based on creating digital solutions for teachers to adapt to hybrid education (face-to-face and online).
During the implementation of the project, a curriculum is created describing the learning techniques and strategies, as well as the learning content, that can be used in online courses and educational games.
The consortium will also provide an E-Learning platform, Open Education Resources. The main output of this project will be an Educational Game.
To develop the first outcome of the project, relating to the curriculum, Focus Groups were held in all the partner countries to analyse teachers’ attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours in relation to the current state of education in their country and the use of technologies and active learning strategies and their effective implementation in the teaching and learning process, as well as their impact on the development of soft skills considered fundamental for students in the future.
The analysis of the reports from each Focus Group showed that:
- In general, teachers use technology in their classrooms and use various types of applications, mainly Open Source and Mobile applications;
- Most teachers already use the active learning strategy PBL – Project/Problem Based Learning, and are unfamiliar with the use of gamification;
- There is interest in exploring more topics, such as the use of virtual reality, interactive animation design, and 3D modelling.
The factor that influences teachers to use/not use these types of strategies/technologies was highlighted as a lack of time to explore other experiences/pedagogies in the classroom, although they feel they are encouraged to do so by their headmasters.
Teachers believe that using these strategies is a way of motivating other teachers to work collaboratively and that good practices and innovative applications of technology in education should be disseminated.
See the Study.
DigiComplex project meeting at Universidade Portucalense
In November, the members of the “DigiComplex” project met at Universidade Portucalense for the project’s second face-to-face meeting.
At this meeting, the next steps in the project were defined and the 5 chapters of the Curriculum were designed, which will be used by teachers to acquire knowledge and skills related to: virtual reality, 3D objects, mobile applications, gamification principles, and collaborative tools.
