Co-creation: Next step in Education
Each time there is something new in education the traditional norms are disturbed and people feel the need to “invent a new terminology”. This has happened also now as computers start to be used in various ways in education. Terminology like “Digital”, “MOOCs”, “Micro-credentials”, “Online”, …. appears. But all this is really only to separate from the “traditional” ex-cathedral education where a teacher stands in front of a class of students.
What is really important is instead to ask what exactly these new perspectives bring to the table. Once this is asked we find that the “delivery mechanism” (online, digital, …) is not what matters, but the learning achieved and the teachers work.
Digital, not digitalized, education
Just digitalizing things are actually not that difficult. Take a written text normally used in an educational situation, just make it into a PDF, there you have it. Then share it with students. Done. You have now digitalized a piece of paper. But that´s not really the big point.
The point is to use digital tools in order to achieve learning-journeys not possible to achieve without digital tools.
In the case of a simple PDF-file you can add links, for instance to good YouTube-clips. Then you have achieved something more, something that can enforce learning way beyond what a single piece of paper can do. But nowadays, with the help of digital tools, we can achieve way beyond this simple text-PDF-example.
Take a laboratory, as an example. Historically, that was a physical thing. Costly to create and set up, also expensive to run. Made at a physical site where students, and teachers, had to go, in order to get access to it.
It´s no coincidence that the EEDA Academy develops/provides –> Remote Labs (100 % online).
Nowadays a laboratory can become digital, saving cost (particularly if students all over the globe use it, shared development cost) as well as travel-time. But, while making it digital one could also make a laboratory where the participants endlessly, without any major cost, can test different parameters and figure out what will happen. One could even enter into the laboratory-site, for instance a digital turbine, something that physically not only would be very costly, but even hard to even do, particularly if at the same time running the turbine.
Digital education is not about digitalizing education. It´s about utilizing digital tools in order to enhance education, way beyond what can be achieved in a “physical world”. That´s what the Energy Educators Global Knowledge-network is achieving.
Beyond tools like MOOCs and YouTube
Huge number of digital sites useful for education already exist, MOOCs and YouTube for example. However; there are limits with these tools.
YouTube is a great bank of resources. But how to know which YouTube-clip to watch? How to find the best one, seriously useful for a learning-purpose? How to use it in a good way?
MOOC´s are also great banks of resources. They are filled with courses possible to take, given by everything from academics, to industry-people. But how to know which courses that are the best ones, even given by the best teachers available on the globe? And why do we so seldom find labs provided by MOOCs?
The Energy Educators Global Knowledge-network go beyond tools like MOOCs and YouTube.
What the EEDA global network achieves
What in some sense the EEDA Academy provides, seen from a Educators/Co-creators point of view, is the same thing as when teachers long time ago started to use books published by others, instead of developing all teaching material by themselves. When we started doing that, teachers suddenly could save a lot of time and resources, at the same time increase quality heavily. One could say that books made it possible for teachers to “co-create” courses with the help that the book-authors provided (the book).
But there still was limits; for instance could never the book-author in return co-create with the teacher that used the book. And none of them involved could co-create new structures jointly – and definitely never online, constantly. With EEDA they now can, by taking Co-creation to a new level.
EEDA provide everything from remote laboratories, lectures like videos and assignments to singular learning-modules and self-paced courses, even academic programs. It also is the first ever truly global on-line educational service only concentrated within the field of Green Economy and a Sustainable Society and high academic level. In other words; EEDA has a unique knowledge base.
What EEDA does is simply; taking the next natural step in the development of digital education.