Abstract:

This communication aims to present an interdisciplinary course for teachers and online course designers created as final output of the Erasmus+ project TASK 21 EdTech and AI for Essential Skills in the 21st Century (reference number 2019-1-FR01-KA203-063063). The consortium that constitutes TASK 21 brings together institutions in the fields of education and technologies of 6 countries (France, Portugal, Italy, Finland, Sweden and Norway) to combine pedagogical and technological knowledge, namely on Artificial Intelligence, to create pedagogic material to help modernize the design of formal educational curricula and pedagogical material to respond to 21st century needs.

We present the path that led to the creation of the course, its content structure, working mode and assessment. This is an online course, involving the flipped classroom methodology, equivalent to a 5-ECTS Curricular Unit, integrating the study plan of the master programmes in the field of Education of the universities participating in the consortium. The pedagogic-methodological design and the choice of course contents were defined from a previous study on the users’ needs, in which questionnaires and interviews were applied to higher education lecturers and students in the fields of education and education technologies in 4 countries. Then, video, audio and written materials were selected, some of which produced by the project’s team. After all the partners had analysed and approved the contents and format, the material was translated into Portuguese, Italian and English and the course was placed on a digital platform (Claned) with recourse to Artificial Intelligence.

The course is structured in 6 parts, each containing audio, video and written material, followed by assessment tests and supplementary material. Each session requires an average workload of 1 hour, followed by group discussions. The platform provides resources to enable interaction with the content, not only among students but also between lecturer and students. Interaction was the more relevant pedagogic factor for learning, indicated in the analysis of the users’ needs carried out previously. The technology used on the platform also provides a set of analyses of the students’ performance which allows the lecturer to know their difficulties regarding specific items of the course and make timely decisions, so as to avoid dropout while providing specific support, both individually and collectively.

The first version of the course was tested in 2021, in the Italian and Portuguese universities that participated in the consortium. From this pilot test, the course was assessed by the participants, by the team members and by external consultants. Adjustments were made and a new version of the course was created. In 2022, the second generation of students of the same universities will participate in the course and will once again assess it at the end of the first semester. At the end of the project, a free MOOC version will be available for all the universities of the European Union.

Keywords:

21st century skills, Pedagogical material, Interdisciplinarity, Curricula.