University Teachers’ Digital Empowerment for Blended Teaching: An Online Training Design

Abstract

Because of the impact of the pandemic in the different sectors of society, blended training solutions have acquired, in the field of education, an important relevance, speeding up a change that would normally require years to be developed.Teachers from all levels of education had to adapt and develop their practices using digital technologies without enough knowledge to do it properly. Considering this context, this paper will present the design of an online training that seeks to empower university teachers to take advantage of the potential of digital technologies to design and implement educational practices in blended settings while they acquire Digital Competences. This training will be applied with a challenge-based learning methodology and from a collaborative perspective. In addition, participants will develop the role of students and teachers at the same time in order to design blended educational practices that respond to the needs of their own students.The proposed training, that will be designed by teachers from the Open University of Catalonia with wide experience on training in Digital Competences and online teaching, will be implemented in 6 countries around Europe (Italy, Spain, Ireland, Greece, Cyprus and Finland), will be developed in the framework of the European project Empower Competences for Onlife Learning in HE (ECOLHE).