With the advent of each new technology come predictions of fundamental changes in education. Yet few of these changes have been realised. Digital learning may indeed be the technology that breaks that pattern, but this will only come to pass if educators are empowered to take advantage of the technologies and methodologies available to them.

The aim of EdDiCo is to give individual educators the means to:

(a) Identify the potential technology holds that can transform and improve the education they offer

(b) Identify the digital skills they would need to benefit from these technologies and associated methodologies

(c) Find the educational resources necessary to acquire these skills.

Competence frameworks provide a list of the skills needed by digital educators. There are a wide number of different Italian, European and sector-wide such frameworks, but many do not have the level of detail useful for designing bite-sized learning programmes for educators. EdDiCo focuses on extracting a set of useful digital education descriptors from the various competence models. These will be provided at three levels:
– different types or categories of competence
– each described in terms of knowledge, skills, autonomy and responsibility, and
– expressed at different levels of achievement.

The aim of the project is then to identify digital education material of high quality.
This phase involves selecting 500 high-quality bite-sized learning opportunities and open educational resources. Educators can access this material to acquire the appropriate digital skills.
Each opportunity and resource will be verified to ensure that it matches the quality required to be included in the database, using a technique that gives particular weight to (a) the provenance of the resources, and (b) the “packaging” of the resources as on-demand courses, for example, as MOOCs. Critically, each resource will also be tagged by category or type / skill / level of attainment / system developed; this will allow educators to target the specific skills they wish to acquire.

The final EdDiCo phase consists of creating tools whereby educators can find and utilise material relevant to their needs.
This process involves creating self-assessment and recommendation tools, enabling educators to assess their current level of digital competence, as well as creating objectives expressing their desired level of achievement. The tools would then be able to suggest appropriate resources and bite-sized learning opportunities as the means for educators to bridge any gaps in their personal digital skills.