by Victoria I. Marín, University of Lleida, Spain.
For the past three years, our team in the CoDiCri project (Critical Digital Competence: towards agency for learning through open educational practices) have been working on addressing the development of critical digital competence that promotes student agency in higher education through open educational practices.
We understand “critical digital competence” as the confident, analytical, ethical, safe and responsible understanding and use of digital technologies as value-laden tools for learning, work, and participation in society, rather than neutral entities.
Within the time of the Project, we have conducted systematic reviews on the three main pillars of the project (critical digital competence, student agency and open educational practices), carried out interviews with higher education faculty members, and designed, implemented and evaluated a total of 16 interventions in education sciences’ courses across 8 Spanish-speaking universities.
As a main objective of the project, we aimed at creating a pedagogical reference framework for the development of open educational practices for Higher Education that contributed to the development of students’ critical digital competence by explicitly promoting the exercise of agency for learning. Explore the pedagogical framework.
The project has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and carried out mainly in the Spanish context; however, most of the materials that are presented here have been also translated into English, apart from all the Spanish co-official languages.
Do you want to design (open) educational practices with the focus on critical digital competence?
Among the CoDiCri specific objectives, we planned to create and validate design instruments to support university educators in this endeavour. In this sense, your starting points are the Digital Kit, which are two web interactive resources that can guide you as an educator in using the pedagogical framework and the conceptual tools of the project and the handbook, soon to be available here.
The 3 conceptual tools integrated in the kit – deriving from the systematic reviews and expert validation – are both theoretical and practical. On the one hand, there is a conceptual framework for critical digital competence, which maps the aims, elements, prerequisites, reasons and ways of developing this competence in connection to student agency and open educational practices (see here). On the other hand, we operationalised the elements of the critical digital competence to enable its analysis and evaluation in pedagogical practices (see the level indicators of the critical digital competence framework). It can be used when (re)designing educational practices or evaluating the development of students’ critical digital competence.
The third tool is the ACAD CoDiCri Toolkit, which is a set of cards and a canvas that can support you hands-on in designing your open educational practices addressing different elements of the critical digital competence and characteristics of student agency. There are two versions:
I. Print & play version to use face-to-face in a same place
II. An online version to use remotely
Finally, we have collected and published all the open educational practices designed, implemented and evaluated within the frame of the project in a catalogue of practices, as well as some of their results.
The focus has been especially education sciences and teacher education, but they can serve as examples of what can be done or as inspiration sources for these contexts or others.
All these Project outputs have Creative Commons licenses so that you, and any other researcher and/or practitioner, can use, reuse, modify and share again the products for the benefit of the higher education community.
Now, we encourage you to explore all these materials and make use of them for improving the critical digital competence of your university students. And please, let us know if you do it and how it worked for you!
If you want to know more about the project you can visit the CoDICRI website.
This publication is part of the R&D&I project PID2022-136291OA-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by ‘ERDF A way of making Europe’.
Author
Victoria I. Marín is an associate professor in the Department of Education Sciences at the University of Lleida (Spain). PhD in Educational Technology: Virtual Learning and Knowledge Management from the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB, Spain). Member of the COMPETECS research group (consolidated group of the Generalitat de Catalunya), research collaborator of the Educational Technology Group of the UIB affiliated to the Institute for Educational Research and Innovation (Palma) and member of the Center for Open Education Research (COER, Oldenburg, Germany). Principal investigator of the research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation “Critical Digital Literacy: towards agency for learning through open educational practices”. More information here.
