Technology has long impacted education. There are several publications dedicated to the fields of edtech, technology enhanced learning and digital education. The technologies themselves run the gamut from simple classroom technologies such as projectors and audience-response systems, to augmented reality, artificial intelligence and simulation technology. With the advent of each new technology come predictions of fundamental changes in education. Yet few of these changes have been realized. 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. European HE in the Humboldtian tradition is based around the acquisition of knowledge through the conflict of ideas using the scientific method, of which a key part is truly independent academics acting as a college. Thus, the focus of our application is to strengthen the digital competence at the core of the educational profession, i.e. in the person and expertise of the educator. This sentiment is echoed by the European Parliament, whose recent report on education in the digital era stresses that teachers and trainers should be at the core of the digital transformation and therefore require adequate initial preparation and continuous training, which must include modules on age- and development-oriented teaching practices. Therefore, the main objective of EdDiCo is to empower individual educators to: (a) identify the potential technology holds to transform and improve their teaching strategies;(b) identify the digital competences they would need to acquire to make the improvements identified;(c) find the learning opportunities and resources suitable to acquire those competences.The project is segmented into:Phase 1. Creating an Organisational Paradigm for digital education training content (O1 & O2).Competence Frameworks provide a list of skills which are needed for digital educators. However, a host of different competence frameworks exist at European, national and sectoral levels, and these do not always have the appropriate level of granularity to be useful for designing micro-learning experiences for educators. Therefore, these two outputs focus on extracting a set of useful descriptors for digital education, which will involve description along three levels, namely:- different dimensions of competence- each described in terms of knowledge, skills, autonomy and responsibility, and- expressed at different levels of achievement.Phase 2. Identifying High Quality digital education training content (O3).This phase will see the identification of 500 high-quality micro-learning opportunities and open educational resources which educators can use to acquire digital competences using. Each opportunity and resource will be quality assured for inclusion in the database, using a methodology which will give particular weight to (a) the provenance of the resources, and (b) the ‘packaging’ of the resources as on-demand course experiences, e.g. through instruments such as MOOCs. Critically, each resource will also be tagged by the dimension / competence / level of achievement system developed in O1 and O2, allowing educators to target the specific skills they wish to acquire.Phase 3. Creating tools to enable educators to find and utilise relevant content (O4)This involves creating self-assessment and recommendation tools which will allow educators to self-assess their current digital competence, target a desired level of achievement, and receive a tailored recommendation in the form of a list of micro-learning opportunities and resources which will allow them to bridge their personal digital skills gap.The project is squarely targeted at educators, but the benefits of it should be felt by all educational stakeholders, most concretely, students, who will benefit from faster adoption of digital pedagogies for their learning. It will be implemented by a consortium of Higher Education research institutions (UNIR, TUNI, DHBW and VMU) together with NGOs (FPM, Stifterverband) and a knowledge transfer organisation (KIC), all of whom have already been actively promoting open education, virtual mobility and the development of short learning programmes that produce widely recognisable credentials. The simple yet ambitious aim of this initiative to create the largest resource for digital teacher education in Europe. By achieving this scale, the project should be able to benefit from network effects, which in turn creates a self-reinforcing cycle of increasing usage, leading to long-term sustainability.

EU recognition instruments such as the diploma supplement and the EQF support the award of qualifications in the areas of formal learning, and are supported by recognition procedures for non-formal and informal learning. The recognition and transfer of individual credits through ECTS was created for an era of physical mobility, and is optimised accordingly. While these tools can be used to support open education and virtual mobility, a number of caveats exist to their use, including that: - little to no guidance exists on how to document virtual mobility / open education experiences for the purposes of credit transfer. - procedures for recognition of prior learning or of non-formal/informal learning do not scale to the massive numbers of students enrolling in open education programmes such as MOOCs - there is no European approach to recognising, transferring or scaling open education modules. These problems are so pronounced, that many open educational providers are creating parallel systems of credentials that are not even described in terms of ECTS - leading to a situation where millions of students per year are enrolling in open courses offered by universities which do not necessarily award valid or recognised forms of credit. This project intends to address these issues by creating a standard format for describing open education and virtual mobility experiences in terms of ECTS which: • Addresses common criticisms (lack of trust) of open education, in particular with respect to student assessment and identity • Is scalable to hundreds or thousands of students through automatic issuing and verification of certificates • Can capture a wide range of non-formal and formal open education experiences Specifically, the project is divided into five stages involving: Stage 1: Definition of Quality Credentials We will propose a quality system that evaluates the quality credential based on their transparency, ease-of-recognition and ease-of-portability – this quality system will then be used to evaluate current credential-types on offer, and to inform credential-improvement activities in the next stages. Stage 2: Enhance Transparency of Quality Credentials by creating a Learning Passport The consortium will propose a transparency instrument, building on proposals in the field, which documents the (a) course design, (b) learning activities undertaken by the learner, and (c) assessment activities, which make up a credential. This ‘learning passport’ is intended to serve as a supplement to the credential, to facilitate its recognition by under institutions. To this end, we will pilot its usage by using it to transfer information on credentials in 6 Higher Education Institutions, thus ensuring that it fulfils its purpose. Stage 3: Propose Technological Methods to Strengthen Automatic Exchange of Recognition Information Should the process of recognition of credentials be conducted entirely manually, it would be extremely time consuming and inefficient, especially were such processes to be conducted at scale. To this end, we will use roadmapping to propose a meta-data standard, ontology and a set of interlocking technologies which would allow for automatic exchange of credentials between Higher Education Institutions Stage 4: Clarify Concepts around Open Educational Recognition The proper use of recognition tools described in Stage 2 and Stage 3 depend on the successful application and understanding of concepts such as estimation of workload, verification of student identity, fair and accurate assessment, and quality assurance of learning. Since there are differences of varying degree in applying these concepts in open education and in traditional formal education, we will propose guidelines for the correct interpretation of each of these concepts. The methodology applied here will involve collaborative authoring by the partners, backed up by the same process of peer-review used under Stage 1. Stage 5: Study and Predict the Impacts of Open Education Recognition We will build exploratory scenarios, which describe events and trends as they could evolve based on alternative assumptions on how open education recognition might influence the future. Thus, the technique will be used to develop a future history—that is, the evolution from present conditions to one of several futures. The scenarios will outline a causal chain of decisions and circumstances that lead from the present, displaying the conditions of important variables over time. We believe that by increasing the quantity and quality of recognition processes in OE we will: • Create new flexible learning pathways for students inside Higher Education • Allow institutions to increase the scope of their offer, by integrating teaching/learning done at other institutions into their curricula • Improve resource-efficiency within HEIs • Lead to an increase in the use and impact of Open Educational Practices