Abstract:

The "information era" has brought up the need for media literacy in the contemporary digital societies. Media literacy is considered today as a crucial part of education, for students, as well as for teachers, as it is the only way to prevent them from being passive consumers. The Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a revolution in e-learning teaching and they promote competitiveness and growth for European citizens (European Commission, 2013, p.2). This article presents the MOOC developed in the framework of the European project “Creative Audiovisual Lab for the promotion of Critical Thinking and Media Literacy”-CrAL.

An online platform, an innovative and already tested as effective, tool by the Hellenic Open University (HOU) - DAISSy Research Group, has been developed for hosting the Creative Audiovisual Lab MOOC that will be offered to teachers, educators, and benefit also students and local communities in five different languages. The CrAL platform has a twofold role, as it has been designed to be both a learning environment and a promotional mean for the dissemination and exploitation of CrAL results.

Through this Lifelong learning platform, the following CrAL objectives will be achieved:
- Access to the four phases of the MOOC into which the lessons are divided. With an overall duration of 20 hours to be taught over a period of 5 weeks, the online course is structured into 10 modules of 2 hours each including: video lessons, reading resources, exercises and module evaluation. All training materials will be uploaded in the CrAL platform.
- Offering of an interesting training path to provide school teachers of Secondary Education and trainers working in non-formal education with the necessary knowledge, competences and skills on audiovisual education and on the innovative methodology of "Creative Audiovisual Writing and Reading”.
- Establishment of a transnational Virtual and effective European Community of Practice (CoP) (including teachers, educators, parents of young people and members of the local community) who will be involved in the project as active players and as members of a newly established Community of Practice to maximize the project's impact at local, national and European level.
- Creation of a showcase for the audiovisual content developed by the young people during the pilot action.

During the MOOC, the CrAL platform will provide user and content management services, content delivery, collaboration services and Community of practice services. Thanks to the CrAL MOOC, teachers and trainers will be helped to address inclusive teaching practices to promote critical thinking, media literacy and active citizenship and to organize curriculum and didactic proposals in order to provide youngsters (14-19 years old) with the most relevant 21st century skills. Then, they will be able to set up efficient learning paths and environments so that knowledge will foster students’ cultural, meta-cognitive, methodological and social skills and competence to nourish inclusiveness and active citizenship among students, which is the ultimate scope of the project.

Finally, the innovative CrAL methodology, based on three crucial steps:
(a) best practice adaptation,
(b) a 3-level of training activities,
(c) establishment of an online community of practice- will be supported by the CrAL platform and the interactive MOOC.

Keywords:

Innovation, Interactive Platform, MOOC, media literacy, e-learning, Virtual CoP.