Abstract:

Investing time in education and training in digital skills for education in the digital age should be high on the teachers’ agenda. Especially after the pandemic, when some skills and know-how in the use of digital technologies have already been gained. Therefore, in preparation for courses today we have a new starting point as teachers and students have some experience in teaching and learning in online environments. Nevertheless, gaining experience is not enough; both of them still need support and further education in the use of digital technologies in the educational process. The E-learning Centre at SRCE (ELC) is a focal point for higher education institutions, teachers and students in support of the application of e-learning tools and technologies in education in Croatia. Besides maintaining the national e-learning platform for higher education, the team of the E-learning Centre provides support and education to users in the implementation of digital technologies in teaching and learning. In everyday work, the ELC team encounters various inquiries related to the development and maintenance of online courses, mostly from teachers. These are not only about the technical possibilities of the e-learning platform, but also about issues related to how to adapt certain parts of classroom teaching to online teaching, instructional design, or how to prepare some new learning materials for the virtual environment. The support in the pedagogical part is extremely important for teachers because it helps them design and implement high-quality online courses. One of the projects in which the ELC team participate is Learning Biology in Epidemiologically Adapted Research Environment. The project aims to adapt biology teaching and learning to the conditions of reduced interactions (during the period of a pandemic), based on modern teaching strategies in biology, and to explore the effects of the epidemiologically adapted biology teaching and learning methods on student performance at the primary and secondary school level. The Faculty of Science of the University of Zagreb leads the project and SRCE is a project partner. One of the project's tasks is setting up an e-learning space for the teachers and students in the project and providing support. The project includes work with teachers and students from more than a hundred primary and secondary schools in the Republic of Croatia together with several higher education institutions in the field of biology. The E-learning Centre team apart from providing support with the use of e-learning tools and technologies organized tailor-made education for teachers to be able to implement digital technologies properly. In this presentation, we will show how support and education were organized for a large number of teachers with different prior knowledge of working in a virtual environment and how the most interesting problems that both participants and teachers as well as experts from the ELC faced, were solved.

Keywords:

e-learning, teachers’ training, digital competence, e-learning centre.