Abstract:

In an era when Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a strong influence on life, work, and education, fundamental digital skills are essential. This gives you the opportunity to use the tools that best suit your needs. There are many options for learning these necessary skills, but they are often very general and not tailored to a specific purpose. This is where Project DigiFit4All, launched in 2020, comes in. Its goal is to create a platform that enables the creation of and participation in personalized open online courses (POOCs). The whole platform is based on competency models, which are generated and organized in a tool called the Graph-based Environment for Competency and Knowledge-item Organization (GECKO). This online tool represents competency models as graphs, with competency formulations as nodes and their dependencies as edges. Additionally, test questions and learning resources can be uploaded and connected to competencies. With the help of the competency models, lecturers can define courses by selecting target competencies from the entire index of competencies they want their students to achieve during the course. The graph form enables the provision of learning paths or necessary prior knowledge for competencies or even whole courses. As a final step, a generated course can be transferred to a Moodle environment using the provided structure and all uploaded learning resources from GECKO.

Besides the development of the platform, teaching and learning resources in the form of open educational resources (OER) and sample courses are also created. For the project, four different target groups were defined: pupils, students, teachers, and administrative staff. During the project, resources for all of them were generated.

After finalizing the applied processes and completing the platform implementation and setup, pilot tests were conducted with two workshop groups. These workshops were part of an advanced studies program in digital skills, and the participants had little prior knowledge in this area. The lecturers used the platform to create the courses, and the participants learned using the resources provided in the Moodle environment. Participants completed a survey before and after the course. They were asked to assess the course and the platform, and their knowledge of some sample content taught on the course was tested. Teachers were also interviewed and asked for their opinion of the platform. Initial results show that all interviewees viewed the ability to work independently, regardless of time or place, and the individualization of the course as very positive. The DigiFit4All approach, which emphasizes skills development, was also perceived positively in the interviews and played a central role. According to the participants and teachers surveyed, this approach enables targeted, effective learning for all involved. Usability did not pose any difficulties. Both participants and teachers rated it positively and expressed this unsolicited in the interviews. In this contribution, the project will be described, and the first survey results will be presented.

Keywords:

Digital Competency, Competency-based, Personalized Open Online Course, Graph-based.