The e-course ‘Digital Empowerment’ aims to address the need for resilience and increased capacity of higher education teachers to manage an effective shift towards digital education and to use emerging technologies up to their full potential while employing instructional design strategies. The MOOC provides higher education teachers with knowledge and skills for successful and innovative use of emerging technologies in teaching, and addresses barriers and negative effects of technologies on inclusion and diversity. It helps teachers to design inclusive and diverse learning paths, amended to the needs and abilities of different student groups, and with attention to digital gaps between student groups and in society as a whole.
The online course contains 8 different modules that help higher education teachers to enhance their own digital knowledge and competences and that helps them to explore the possibilities to integrate emerging technologies into their own learning experience design:
• Module 1: Learning experience design for socially responsible behavior, digital inclusion, democracy and diversity
• Module 2: Defining instructional media, evaluation and delivery strategies to promote inclusion and diversity in the digital ecosystem
• Module 3: Introducing Games with a Purpose, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual and Augmented Reality and Robotics to inclusive online learning environments
• Module 4: Creating interactive content that fosters digital skills and delivers the promise for a more inclusive society
• Module 5: Digital learning culture for promotion of curiosity and critical thinking
• Module 6: Digital mindfulness of learners in relationship with technology
• Module 7: Managing and evaluating learning activities (storytelling; scenario-based approach; toolkit approach; demonstration-practice method)
• Module 8: Development of skills and competencies of the local community through service-learning programs and initiativesThe MOOC is accesible for free by registering via the website. Registering for this MOOC also gives access to the SLIDE project MOOC ‘Digital Development’ for students.
The workload to complete the MOOC is about 6 hours.