“Digital education does not come naturally. You have to organize teaching in a completely different way than you’re used to…”
(Quoted from Kristensen, Claus B. (2021): “Digitization is more than technology”. In The Danish Agency for Higher Education and Science (2021): “Digital opportunities in Erasmus+”).
The AiDKiT project has its overall background in the general teaching/learning experiences that emerged during the global COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns of face-to-face educational environments in its wake. In the wake of the pandemic, many teachers and trainers throughout Eurepe experienced to be unprepared in terms of conducting a teaching and pedagogical approach entirely based on digital methods and tools. At the same time, it turned out that many adult learners in non-formal adult education did not possess the necessary skills and technical prerequisites to take part in the new digital teaching and learning universe. Nor in many cases were they motivated to switch to the new kind of learning processes.
This current challenge in adult education – and incidentally also in youth education – has been the springboard for the AiDKiT project with the main questions of how to use new pedagogical-didactic approaches to motivate learners to make use of the new and forward-looking teaching and learning opportunities in digital technologies, as reinforced by the pandemic. This has also given rise to the question of what digital pedagogy actually is.
DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES OFFERS NEW TEACHING/LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES
Some scientists have declared that digital pedagogy is not merely a question of including certain digital tools in the pedagogical-didactic planning that otherwise form the framework of teaching. On the contrary, the introduction of digital technologies in itself changes the framework for both teaching and learning, i.e. the pedagogical-didactic approach, the teaching process and the learning situation. By explaining digital pedagogy, other scientists also pointed to the fact that digital teaching and learning can be emancipatory insofar that it gives learners the opportunity to control their own learning process to a greater extent than in the traditional teacher-focused learning environment. “Flipped Learning” or “The inverted classroom” are methodical examples of the flexible, learner-centred approach that digital educational methodologies have helped to promote.
From these perspectives, digital pedagogy is also about exploring and describing how digital teaching/learning approaches and methodologies can facilitate learning processes and improve the performance among learners, not least adult learners with no specific learning prerequisites. Even though teachers and learners have each their goals in a teaching-learning process, it is highly relevant for both groups to understand how technology and didactic activities enters into an interaction with a view to achieving certain goals in certain contexts. The digital didactics thereby also aims to strengthen the teaching and qualify the didactic designs that the teachers/trainers develop and use to create motivation and effective learning processes among their learners:
“Precisely because of their potential to change education unbidden, it is imperative that teachers and lecturers place themselves in a position where they are able to master the use of digital technologies to harness their power and put them to the proper service of education…”
(Laurillard, 2013, s.2 Quoted from Laurillard, D. (2008): “The teacher as action researcher: Using technology to capture pedagogic form”. In Studies in Higher education)
AIDKIT EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMME ON DIGITAL TEACHING/LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES
As the next step in the AiDKiT activities, the participating educational experts will collaborate to put together a special educational program for teachers who would like to qualify their digital teaching activities based on a motivating pedagogical-didactic approach. This also applies to teachers’ understanding of the areas in which digital technologies place new and special demands on pedagogical thinking and practice.
