We live in a digital world. This fact is one of the biggest challenges that our society faces. It is far too simple to either think that digitalization solves all of our problems or go into retreat and deny the great benefits of using digital media.
This being said I have worked as an entrepreneur for over 20 years and as a teacher in Upper Secondary for the past 16 years. This combination has resulted in concepts related to digital learning and products.
By chance I was connected to one of the most innovative learning initiatives in Austria in the past 30 years called COOL (CO-operative Open Learning):
Youtube Videos:
Cool Concept
Cool Origins
Cool in Austria
Teacher cooperation
Team building
Parent work
Work life
I was asked to add the dimension of elearning and using digital media to this concept and developed eCOOL.
The COOL initiative focuses on open learning scenarios and giving students the self confidence they need to cope with a continuous changes of our work life and society. The focus is put on the development soft skills (personal, social and digital competencies) and self-instructedness (life long learning concept). These are qualities that companies need looking for new employees.
My product series – exabis (exabis eportfolio, exabis competence grid, exabis student review) has been developed having these aspects in mind and have by now become a fully featured software package that covers the following aspects:
- ePortfolio work (students create learning products and publish them adding metadata like competence-fields)
- collaborative development of digital competence grids (by teachers adding tasks based upon the SAMR-model and materials to the grids)
- working within competence fields for individualization purposes (thereby creating adaptive learning scenarios which involve learners and teachers)
- reflecting learning processes (done by teachers and students for assessement purposes)
- generating reports from collected student data (showing their individual development in competence fields and soft skills)
- working with weekly learning plans (which can be filled with tasks by students and teachers)
- using Moodle as the #1 Open Source eLearning solution worldwide
- simplifying the use of learning management systems working with web-apps as a frontend like eLOVE and DAKORA