Introduction to dTeach

Introduction page consisting of an abstract, the description of the background and the problem, the solution dTeach offers, and the description of the community pools and processes behind dTeach.

Abstract

dTeach is a decentralized platform for the creation of Open Educational Resources (OER), where independent teachers and educational researchers actively produce high-quality content and bring innovation to their students.

Background & Problem

The current educational crisis puts teachers and students as well as universities and research organizations under pressure to rapidly expand their capabilities in the fields of digital learning and teaching. With digitalization the access to education and participation in pedagogic and didactic dialogues have taken on an increasingly global dimension even though many teachers and schools still lack access to scientifically and pedagogically sound as well as adequate, adaptable and applicable teaching and learning resources. Such resources actually equal the goals of the UNESCO backed movement behind Open Educational Resources (OER), which by providing publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under open licenses, seek to provide an enhanced educational paradigm. While the OER movement and OER’s are gaining importance globally and although there is a myriad of resources available, there is still much to advance concerning teacher professional development, especially when it comes to providing resources that value the autonomy and subjectivity of teachers, as well as the complex nature of teaching and learning in different contexts. There is much room to create teaching and learning opportunities where contemporary research on education is considered and reaches the classroom by making use of collaborative perspectives instead of top-down and homogenized programs. In this changing environment, digitalization and blockchain technology open up numerous perspectives for educational and academic access and collaboration, which exceed the geographical, political, and social boundaries of traditional teaching and learning.

OER’s struggle with the scarce time of teachers, no remuneration for content creators, and close to no incentives for the educational community to proof or test the resources. Therefore, even though there is a huge potential of OER’s to innovate the education system, with the lack of scientific and pedagogical proof and proper incentivation for their creation and testing they won’t. Furthermore most content creators and teachers etc. are not interested in creating material they have close to no creator rights on - and could theoretically be used and even sold after their publication - without them profiting from it. Therefore the attractiveness of creating OER is very low for a researcher. dTeach solves this problem by incentivizing the creation process with financial compensation via crypto currency.

The availability of funding in the field of education is currently concentrated on large corporations and foundations which not necessarily deliver appropriate solutions to the challenges of the teachers. Furthermore, in order to avoid private sector bureaucracy, these actors mainly concentrate on the private education system rather than the public structures. There is an expressive gap between the funding institutions and the classroom, not to mention the lack of expertise in the creation of adoptable content. Much of the content is delivered without any quality check and distributed in prescriptive and homogenizing perspectives to the teachers. On the other side, good educational researchers and educational practitioners don't have the funding to build and share authentic content on which they are proved experts. In addition, there's a large number of teachers that are not being connected with programs of continued education.

We advocate for a structure and process where teachers and students are not seen as passive consumers of rather centralized educational resources or substandard OER’s* but as active ‘prosumers’ bringing in their expertise and classroom experience to the creation, testing and evaluation of quality assured OER’s. A teacher's continued education is key to the student’s success and for a better involvement as an educator. More than just attending online courses indistinctly to accumulate certificates, nowadays, teachers also need content that supports them in the development of contemporary themes with criticality and literacy. This can be achieved by opening debates and offering solutions in the content that is being created and then distributed to the schools – this is where we recognize the importance of teachers in their own professional development. It is necessary to elevate the level of discussions in these processes by bringing analysis and questions that do not tell more of the same regarding what a teacher is supposed to do.

The main motivation for dTeach comes from this need to make available, critical, in-depth, and relevant content for the teacher's continued education as well as scientifically and pedagogically sound highest quality OER’s.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed instructional materials such as text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing, as well as for research purposes. For more information check the dTeach OER guide and: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources

Solution

dteach promotes and supports the integration of digital collaboration formats in teaching and learning resource production within the framework of international teaching cooperation; the development of digital skills for students and teachers; extended access to international teaching and learning material for specific target groups (e.g. non-mobile students) and the formation of a community of practice. The virtual exchange among educational content creators, scientists and teachers represents an interactive and cooperation-based bridge to the world and serves to systematically intensify international collaboration and shape them around new models of teaching and pedagogy. The teacher-oriented focus of dteach encourages engagement with the cultural context of other teachers and makes the digitally-based collaboration on teaching and learning resources a subject of the teaching-learning experience.

Below there is a summary of solutions brought by dteach:

• An efficient process of resource production that ensures quality - community, decentralization, several quality-checkpoints, peer-reviewed and based on proven expertise.

• Fair remuneration to the entire resource production chain: from authors and content creators, to scientists, to teachers and their classroom.

• Valorization of teacher's profession by investing on them and their local initiatives towards innovation in the classroom.

• Diverse, contemporary, relevant, up to date, and open-source content that improves the quality of education and reaches teachers and their students.

• Provide capillarity to quality research in education, in order to access schools underserved by the states and other institutions.

Objectives

dteach aims to simultaneously achieve the following goals:

• Decentralize the production, offer and access to open educational content.

• Foster educational justice and the public education system by providing highest quality and up-to-date teaching material

• Democratize access to funding opportunities to educational innovation.

• Offer fair remuneration to the entire chain of actors in education, including support to the schools where participant teachers are located.

• Establish a chain of production of resources that ensures quality, relevance and accreditation to the resources created.

• Improve the quality of teachers’ professional development by bringing in-depth discussions, elevating the debate on educational innovation, and avoiding naïve conceptions containing more-of-the-same regarding education.

• Create and facilitate international cooperation among teachers to form a community of innovative practices.

• Create and facilitate international cooperation among scientists and teachers to establish an interdisciplinary community, transfer and dialogue.

Products

Target Groups

Funders

• International & national funds

• Intergovernmental organizations

• Educational, scientific and cultural organizations

• Governments (Ministries)

• International cooperations / development cooperations

• Companies (CSR)

Prosumers

• Educational content creators

• Editors & publishers

• Researchers & scientists

• Translators and local experts (adaptation)

• Teachers, educators & teacher trainers

• Pedagogues

• University professors

• Filmmakers, graphic & web designers

Consumers

• Teachers, educators & teacher trainers

• Kids & students (kindergarden, pre-school, school, vocational training, university)

• Parents

• Public & private schools

• Community colleges

Uniqueness

• Community-based assessment of educational resources.

• We create clusters of collaborative productions enriched by the contributions of researchers from multiple disciplines.

• We are aware of and avoid ethnocentric biases, as well as homogenizing discourses in teacher education and educational content creation.

• Every payment is public for consultation, as well as every product/content created. 100% transparency ensured by blockchain technology.

• The productions can be simultaneously anchored in several platforms so that the ownership of the content is shared.

• We position educators as content producers / exporters and not as consumers of foreign innovation.

• We work with multiple partners and minimize biases

• We don't rely on the bureaucratic institutions such as universities or ministries of education to access teachers, as philanthropic institutions usually do.

• Freedom of speech – we have ability to bring questions regardless of sponsors’ biases.

• Teachers are empowered, have voice and recognition.

• Diversity of innovative educational content - we cover from blockchain to pedagogic themes and explain complex topics with clarity. We keep the school informed about contemporary themes.

• With the system, we support both teachers and researchers in their profession.

• We decentralize resources. Therefore, we don't give the money to those who already have enough political and economic capital.