Abstract:

The Internet of Things (IoT) lies at the intersection of numerous digital technologies and forms a new computing paradigm, where everyday devices or “things” connect to each other in a global framework of computation and communication. IoT has thus made it possible to bridge the physical and virtual worlds, disrupting the way we work and live and offering previously unimaginable capabilities for businesses and consumers. The need for greater awareness of the opportunities presented by digitalisation and key emerging technologies such as IoT, for society at large, as well as the need for a greater investment in the development of digital competence and skills of citizens have been recognised at EU level in several policy documents. Educators and learning centres have a constant need of high-quality upskilling training, especially regarding topics pertaining to contemporary technologies. Increasing the capacity to include such topics in the training offer requires time, effort, equipment and resources that might be limited in learning centres. Therefore, it is essential to upskill adult educators and empower adult learning centres in the provision of basic digital skills and competences, specifically the knowledge and understanding of key emerging digital technologies, such as IoT.

To achieve these fundamental aims we designed and implemented a MOOC on IoT, using OERs of diverse formats. This MOOC aims to provide a well-rounded modular curriculum on IoT, describing its conceptual, technological and social aspects in tandem with real-world examples and case studies. It is designed for anyone who is interested in IoT and is intended to assist the learners in understanding the focus areas through learning material that is of intermediate level of difficulty. This course was developed in the context of Erasmus+ project ADA (All Digital Academy: Upskilling adult educators on key digital emerging technologies), which aims at supporting adult educators and trainers by offering up-skilling training activities on emerging technologies, focusing on ΙοΤ and AI.

The IoT MOOC covers 10 DigComp competences, each associated with different IoT topics. The latter were grouped to form 12 learning modules that have specific aims, prerequisites and requirements. The course is implemented in three different sequential cycles lasting 12 weeks each (with each week covering one learning module), with a weekly workload of 2 hours.

In this paper, we present the design and implementation decisions for supporting the modular architecture of the MOOC and the development of the OERs. Finally, we discuss the evaluation results of the 1st cycle, which was completed in September 2023, as recorded by pre- and post-training questionnaires. In total, 98 people participated in the MOOC and 45% of them (n=44) successfully completed it. We found significant improvement in the participants’ knowledge on IoT. The opinion of the participants was quite positive in terms of perceived quality, continuance intention, learning process quality and satisfaction. While they considered the course to be useful the mean answers’ score was lower than the other factors warranting further investigation. Additionally, we explored the most important retention factors and received valuable qualitative feedback for the improvement of this MOOC, as reported in the paper.

Keywords:

Internet of Things, MOOC, adult educators, continuing training.