ENriching Circular use of OeR for Education

Unipi Team Leader: Andrea Bonaccorsi, Department of Energy, Systems, Territory, and Construction Engineering

The digital era is changing the role of educators, that are moving towards becoming education and experiences designers. Furthermore, pedagogical contents are now distributed and accessible, ready to be used for the creation of courses to answer students’ needs for everchanging skills.

Project ENCORE (ENriching Circular use of OeR for Education) aims to support this change, by contributing to the teaching and recognition of the skills most affected by macro-trends (digitalization, climate change and post-COVID economic recovery challenges). ENCORE will implement a quantitative/data-driven phase and a qualitative/expert-driven phase, to reuse Open Educational Resources (OER), and support educators in teaching and learning design.

The first phase relies on Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods. The project will start identifying digital, green, and entrepreneurial (GDE) skills, and link them to OER, to create a database. The ENCORE database will be exploited by the project thanks to NLP, extracting concepts (i.e. building blocks of a lesson) from OER texts, to create a conceptual map for each skill. Maps are the base to create the ENCORE enablers, an interface between the OER database, educators, and learners. The enablers will exploit Gamification techniques, to engage students in the teaching and assessment of skills.

The second macro-phase aims to create all the supporting pedagogical material for the ENCORE approach. The partners will develop and internally validate the pedagogical guidelines for the use of the ENCORE approach, which will be then tested on a wide audience of educators and learners in real-world lessons. These steps will allow to improve the ENCORE approach and to create a course that teaches educators how to use it.

The project will end working on the creation of an open recognition ecosystem of GDE skills taught with the ENCORE approach, which will be tested during the internal pilot phase, and officially released during the external pilot

Coordinator: UNIVERSITA' DI PISA 

Other participants:

CHALMERS TEKNISKA HOEGSKOLA AB (Sweden)
UNIVERSIDAD DE SALAMANCA (Spain)
UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI PADOVA (Italy)
VALUEDO SRL (Italy)
BEAM ME UP SRL (Italy)
ADECCO TRAINING (Italy)
Reconnaître - OPEN RECOGNITION ALLIANCE (France)
KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATION REUTLINGEN UNIVERSITY (Germany)
HELLENIC OPEN UNIVERSITY (Greece)
INSTITUT POLYTECHNIQUE UNILASALLE (France)
FONDAZIONE BRUNO KESSLER (Italy)
VERENIGING VAN EUROPEAN DISTANCE TEACHING UNIVERSITIES (Netherlands)

Start date: 01-06-2022

End date: 30-04-2025

EU Grant: 1.199.064,00 €

Project website: https://project-encore.eu/