Co-design for the enhancement of digital competencies of educators

As our classrooms and teaching environments have shifted fully to remote teaching, and back to blended and hybrid modes, we are working with increasingly complex technologies. We rely on each other to support one another with resilience to sustain and maintain our teaching presence in various ways. This presentation describes a design thinking tool that has been developed within an Erasmus + project, called CUTE, that is working to examine ways to support the digital competence of teachers in higher education. The tool itself comprises of a canvas, which can be used in a digital or paper format, for use by groups of educators and/or supporting services to co-design actions and articulate ways to overcome some of the challenges that teaching with technology has introduced. This work is leading up to the articulation of a complete toolkit to with exemplars on actions across five partner universities across Europe. It supports the definition of aspirations by identifying the targets of an action, a time scale, goals (both strategic and operational), how impact will be evaluated, along with encouraging participants to specify indicators of progress. The canvas also asks the team to clearly label the DigCompEdu domain at which the action is directed. The design tool has been used with diverse teams of learning designers, educational developers, managers, and teachers, across the project partners, and has also been translated into the Irish language. In this presentation, we will showcase the canvas, and invite you to consider how this approach might work in your own teaching and learning context.