Erasmus+ Digital Education
The corona pandemic has uncovered a number of systemic inequalities with regard to education and access to learning opportunities. Across countries and settings in the EU, the necessity to resort to the digital sphere with learning has shown that it is not equally possible for all members of a society to follow suit. Particularly vulnerable groups (including people with a migration background, people with a refugee background, non-native speakers), who were already having a difficult experience before, have now been even more strongly left behind in terms of education. For some it is the lack of access to equipment (Tablets, or Laptops and PCs) with necessary digital technologies, that prevents their engagement in a digital learning sphere. For others it is the prevalent distance to learning institutions and a perception of the education system as a closed space that prevents their engagement. Their educational opportunities remain unexplored and chances for societal participation limited as a result.
Due to the lack of access to educational institutions and little or no equipment (Tablets, or Laptops and PCs) with necessary digital technologies, young people found it difficult to follow classes. ICT and above all the smartphone can be used here to mitigate this deficit. The needs and challenges of the target group must be taken into account (i.e. no up-to-date smartphones with outdated software). Our idea is to communicate learning content to vulnerable people in a new way by using chat bots in the chat application Telegram:
- Teachers will provide the learning material in the backend in a pre-defined way.
- The server will send the learning material to the Telegram Chat-Bot
- The user can access a variety of different learning materials (based on classes but also on the material itself such as videos, PDFs, texts, pictures) and can also answer question will be analyzed.
- The user receives feedback for his answers and can also track his learning progress
To achieve this, the SEEDS project takes a step-by-step approach, and: 1) identifies appropriate contents for learning materials in a participatory action research approach involving teachers, municipal officials, cultural mediators, as well as the target group of young and adult learners from socially and culturally diverse, educationally distant family backgrounds; 2) creates templates and guidance for content creation by cultural mediators; 3) conducts a networked evaluation across different learning settings in Europe, thus enabling the testing of the socio-technical system as well as the identification of ‘universal’ European application scenarios.