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  • COMPETENCE AREA 5: EMPOWERING LEARNERS

    Introducing Empowering Learners

    One of the key strengths of digital technologies in education is their potential for supporting learner-centered pedagogic strategies and boosting the active involvement of learners in the learning process and their ownership of it. Thus, digital technologies can be used to facilitate learners’ active engagement, e.g. when exploring a topic, experimenting with different options or solutions, understanding connections,  coming up with creative solutions, or creating an artifact and reflecting on it.

    The following Competences are covered in this course:

    1. Accessibility and Inclusion.
    2. Differentiation and Personalization.
    3. Actively Engaging Learners.


  • COMPETENCE 5.1: ACCESSIBILITY AND INCLUSION

    At the end of this Section, you should be able to:

    • Understand the importance of ensuring equal access to the digital technologies used for all students be aware that digital technologies can hinder or improve accessibility.
    • Understand how access to digital technology creates divides and how students’ social and economic conditions have an impact on the way technology is used. 
    • Ensure that all students have access to the digital technologies you use.
    • Recognize that compensatory digital technologies can be used for learners in need of special support (e.g. learners with physical or mental constraints; learners with learning disorders). You will be able to select digital pedagogical strategies that adapt to learners’ digital contexts, e.g. limited usage time, type of device available.
    • Consider and respond to potential accessibility issues when selecting, modifying, or creating digital resources and provide alternative or compensatory tools or approaches for learners with special needs.
    • Employ digital technologies and strategies, e.g. assistive technologies, to remediate individual learners’ accessibility problems, e.g. visual or hearing impairments.
    • Select and employ digital pedagogical strategies fitted to learners’ digital technology uses competencies, expectations, attitudes, misconceptions, and misuses. 
    • Employ design principles for increasing accessibility for the resources and digital environments used in teaching, e.g. as concerns font, size, colours, language, layout, structure. 
    • Monitor and reflect on the suitability of the measures implemented to improve accessibility and adapt your strategies accordingly.

  • COMPETENCE 5.2: DIFFERENTIATION AN PERSONALIZATION

    At the end of this section you should be able to:

    • Be aware that digital technologies can support differentiation and personalisation, e.g. by providing activities at different levels and speeds.
    • Select and use some learning activities, e.g. quizzes or games, that allow learners to proceed at different speeds, select different levels of difficulty and/or repeat activities previously not solved adequately.
    • Design learning and assessment activities that use a range of different digital technologies, which you adapt and adjust to account for different needs, levels, speeds, and preferences.
    • Sequence and implement learning activities that allow for different learning pathways, levels, and speeds and flexibly adapt your strategies to changing circumstances or needs.
    • Design, in collaboration with learners and/or other stakeholders, personalised learning plans which allow all learners to follow their individual learning needs and preferences, with the aid of appropriate digital resources.
    • Reflect on how effectively the teaching strategies that you employed, foster differentiation and personalization and adapt your teaching strategies and digital activities accordingly.

  • COMPETENCE 5.3: ACTIVELY ENGAGING LEARNERS

    At the end of this section you should be able to:

    • Use digital technologies to visualize and explain new concepts in a motivating and engaging way, e.g. by employing animations or videos.
    • Employ digital learning activities which are motivating and engaging, e.g. games, quizzes.
    • Put learners’ active use of digital technologies at the center of the instructional process.
    • Choose the most appropriate tool for fostering learner active engagement in a given learning context or for a specific learning objective.
    • Use a range of digital technologies to create a relevant, rich, and effective digital learning environment, e.g. by addressing different sensory channels, learning styles, and strategies, by methodologically varying activity types and group compositions. 
    • Reflect on how effective the teaching strategies employed are in increasing learner engagement and active learning.
    • Select, design, employ and orchestrate the use of digital technologies within the learning process according to their potential for fostering learners’ active, creative and critical engagement with the subject matter.
    • Reflect on how suitable the different digital technologies I use are in increasing learners’ active learning and adapt my strategies and choices