BLUE ARROW MOOC will have a broad audience. Partnership foresees six main target groups:
1) Teacher Educators in Universities.
2) Initial Teacher Education and Continuing Training program developers.
3) Pre-service and in-service teachers in kindergarten and primary schools.
4) Students in pedagogy and psychology.
5) Caregivers of child with special needs between 4-7.
6) Parents.
O2 will be highly tangible because will be delivered as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) developed and offered through the Moodle platform at M19. In the next month (M20) will be the official international presentation (E6). For this reason it has intrinsically a transferability potential for a wide audience and the course will be drafted in order to have a potential for an easy integration into the courses in the Teacher Education Programmes all over the Europe, and a future translation in new languages. However, a potential of O2 is the translation in more languages. MOOC will be in 5 languages: English, Italian, Spanish, Albanian and Dutch.
The expected impact is to innovate the MOOC sector by including procedural teaching using digital creativity, Smart Objects and Tangible User Interfaces (TUI) for teacher education with concrete and multisensory approach for preschool and primary teaching. This could have an impact in facing the COVID-19 consequences, proposing an open course that teaches to teachers how to perform online lessons and laboratory activities for children between 4-7, exploiting the opportunities of digital assets and new innovative methodologies as TUIs.
This is relevant in particular for distance and blended teaching/learning approaches, decisive during the lockdowns and appliable in different situations (i.e. geographical distances, “Small schools” movements, etc.).
The output will offer benefits as a prevention of future needs of distance learning for pre-primary and primary schools as consequence of pandemic but is a strategic tool in order to provide teachers digital and innovative skills for the school of tomorrow.
Few MOOCs on teacher education in digital era are available, they mainly focus on digital competences or in technology enhanced learning, but few involve competences and solution for distance teaching. In addition, this MOOC has the strong added value to include innovative elements as the application of laboratory activities for teacher education of pre-primary and primary schools with ground-breaking Tangible User Interfaces. The MOOC will include procedural teaching for children with a game-based approach and exercises co-created with teacher educators and teachers based on a scientifically relevant pedagogical model (O1).
The MOOC will include lessons based on digital creativity topics and strategies and solutions for the management of distance teaching for children between 4-7. The course will offer online materials, such as podcasts, videos and, whenever possible, webinars and practical experiences based on the BLUE ARROW KIT (O3) that will exploit Tangible User Interfaces paradigm.
The BLUE ARROW MOOC will incorporate collaborative construction functionalities (actually being a cMOOC) of a shared corpus opposed to the transmission of a corpus "state of the art" through classic xMOOC designs. Collaboration will be controllable in order to avoid chaotic or non-controllable learning. Drawing upon the theory of connectivism, the cMOOC will facilitate collaborative learning and communication when needed. Participants will also learn by making connections, through communicating and collaborating with others.
This way, basic educational goals can be set and reached and at the same time, the subject offered is provided in a flexible manner. The assessment of learners will be multi-faceted. For the design and development of the MOOC we will use formal standards such as ELOT:1429 and MOOQ’s Quality Reference Framework for MOOCs (based on ISO/IEC 40180).
All told, the aims of the O2 are:
(1) To define a course syllabus on teacher education for distance learning with the collaboration of HEIs, pedagogists and teacher educators.
(2) To develop a set of MOOC learning contents including strategies to apply tangible exercises for distance teaching empowered by digital component.
(3) To deliver video contents made with professional shape and aimed at increasing the motivation in MOOC.
(4) To integrate in operative way a new training model based on tangible objects for a real inclusive learning strategy, considering also different special needs and sensory disabilities.