Abstract:

Producing open, massive, and trilingual courses with teams distributed across four countries and two continents poses challenges that go beyond instructional design, including different time zones, diverse academic cultures, and the need to maintain pedagogical coherence across three languages simultaneously. This paper describes how the Embrace project (Education Modernization Brazil, Colombia, Europe), funded by the Erasmus+ Programme, addressed these challenges by developing a trilogy of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) as a core component for teacher training in digital and pedagogical competencies. The project involved seven institutions from Brazil, Colombia, Finland, and Portugal and 41 professors over three years (2023–2026).

The three courses form a structured learning pathway based on DigCompEdu (European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators), covering its six competence areas in complementary pairs. The first MOOC, Digipedia, addresses digital resources and assessment (areas 2 and 4). The second, Active Pedagogies with Digital Tools, focuses on active learning in digital environments (areas 3 and 5). The third, Digital competences for professional development, establishes connections between education and the world of work (areas 1 and 6).

The instructional design followed the ADDIEM model (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation and MOOC), derived from the ADDIE model but adapted to the specific context of MOOCs, aiming to ensure quality throughout the entire process. The CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) approach supported the trilingual nature of the courses, offered in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.

For the development of the MOOCs, teachers were organized into three groups, each responsible for building one MOOC. Each group held several online meetings to define learning objectives, content, and activities, as well as the competencies to be developed, producing the required artifacts and following the ADDIEM stages. Media production was carried out by teachers in their native languages, guided by CLIL principles. The entire process was coordinated and monitored by specialists from IFES, one of the partner institutions, responsible for the Open Courses Platform where the MOOCs are hosted.

To enable large-scale multilingual production on the Moodle platform, specialized Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents were developed to support translation and formatting of textual content and assessment instruments. Manual production time for content was reduced by approximately 70%, and for assessment questionnaires by approximately 90%, resulting in an estimated savings of 38 hours of operational work. This reduction allowed the team to redirect efforts toward improving instructional design and pedagogical curation.

Preliminary platform results indicate significant participant engagement: the first MOOC registered 631 enrollments and 229 certificates (36.3% completion rate); the second, 1,860 enrollments and 472 certificates (25.4%); and the third, 761 enrollments and 213 certificates (28.0%). Participant evaluations reflect strong learner satisfaction, with an average recommendation score of 9.34 out of 10. These results suggest that the trilogy effectively contributes to the development of competencies aligned with DigCompEdu. The paper discusses these findings and presents a replicable model for AI-assisted multilingual MOOC production in international cooperation contexts.

Keywords:

MOOCs, DigCompEdu, Teacher Training, Erasmus+, Artificial Intelligence, Multilingual Education, CLIL, International Collaboration.