Abstract:

We live in a fast changing world, where we often have the feeling that we must keep ourselves studying over and over again. A helpful solution to this human need can be the existence of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), which offer a large variety of courses that are designed to be accessible by anyone, from any location. An interesting project is the Erasmus+ Digital Culture project, which aims to create a sustainable and efficient educational program dedicated to adult learners with low digital skills and low-qualified adults involved in the creative industries sector from Romania, Italy, Austria, Denmark, Lithuania, UK and Ireland. The multilingual online courses are hosted on the UniCampus platform, which is the first MOOC platform in Romania open to all universities. In this paper, we will present the development and evaluation of the DigiCulture online courses, hosted on the UniCampus platform, and how the participants’ digital competences benefited. The paper will introduce also the 13 short online courses and discuss how they can be used during the current pandemic situation and in the future to improve relevant digital competences of adults. The first pilot for the DigiCulture course was run with adults, students in engineering within creative industries, as software engineering, media engineering and production and electronics and communications Engineering. The second pilot involved students and young adults from culture area of creative industries and in this study, we will present the results comparative analyse and inquire if their digital competences have been improved or not.

The DigiCulture course are designed on a MOOC type platform – UniCampus – following the MOOC development guidelines. A MOOC is defined as being an online course, addressed to an unlimited number of participants, sustaining an open education. Most of the participants to this survey agreed that there is no need to have a technical background in order to use the UniCampus website, so we can conclude that the evaluated product is appropriate to be used by a beginner, or an adult with limited digital competences.

Keywords:

Digital competences, digital culture.