PROMOTING DIGITAL COMPETENCE IN TEACHERS TRAINING DESIGNING OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

Open Educational Resources (OER) has improved for more than fifteen years since the term was introduced for the first time in a formal context, during the Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries, in 2002. OERs are resources that are free to use for teaching and learning and they have to be licensed for no-cost availability and access, for use, reuse, revise and remixing. The category of OER can contain many types of educational resources, including lecture slides and notes, textbooks, images and photos, videos and tutorials. Nowadays, one of the most crucial challenge in the pedagogical debate in Italy is the pre-service teacher education. Taking into account that professional preparation and professional growth of teacher is a continuous process, these authors believe that pre-service teacher training needs to be oriented to the development of digital competence, through laboratory practice. This idea is already included in a number of teaching/learning theories. Within this context and following the principles of constructivism approach in education, pre-service teachers are expected to be able to design educational resources to fit contemporary learning demand. Moreover, in this research will be shown that textbooks currently being used in school leave inacceptable gaps when covering sustainable development by ignoring both, core issues of sustainable improvement and central didactic standards of education, such as competency-orientation. Designing OERs during pre-service training can help future teacher developing specific didactic competences, that are specified in the Digital Competence Framework for Educators (DigCompEdu).

Starting from an experience which took place in an University in southern Italy, during the Educational Technology Lab, this research describes the teaching/learning model that has been implemented: it was a laboratory approach to teaching that is characterized by planning learning activities to solve specific problem. In this case, the objective of the lab activities was designing OERs that could, on the one hand, develop digital competence in pre-service Teachers Training, and on the other hand, to promote the use of OERs for lifelong and lifewide learning. The main purpose of this study is to describe the Teachers Training experience in designing OERs, during the learning activity provided for the Educational Technology Lab. Moreover, to understand how to improve teaching practices for Teacher Training, secondary purpose in this exploratory research is to comprehend which factors had influenced the choice of the topic in the construction of OERs.

Results show that the first cause is the individual preference, the second is the ductility, flexibility and interactivity of digitized OERs. Further discussions and insights must be addressed.