1) The eDidaktikum is an online community designed to scaffold student teachers into digital culture by providing a controlled environment and resources for sharing best practices. 2) It aims to address the gap in digital skills between experienced teachers and their students by integrating digital activities and resources throughout teacher education programs. 3) Using a design-based research methodology, the eDidaktikum prototype provides scaffolding and gradually fading support to help student teachers develop digital competencies and a personal learning environment through community participation, annotation of resources, and competence-based assessment.

1. eDidaktikum: online community for scaffolding
student teachers into digital culture
Kairit Tammets, Priit Tammets, Mart Laanpere :: Tallinn University, Estonia
ECER 2014, Porto :: Network 6 :: Open Learning: Media, Cultures, Environments

2. Prologue
 1993: e-mail courses, mailing lists for teachers
 1997: Tiger Leap, national strategy for IT in schools
 1999: the first teachers’ portal in Estonia
 2005: 70% of all Estonian teachers trained in IT skills
 2007: LeMill.net
 2009: teachers’ portal Koolielu.ee, today:
 More than 7000 registered users (there are 14 000
teachers in Estonia)
 Less than 8000 Learning Objects

3. Problem
 Teachers (both experienced and recently graduated ones) belong to
different culture than their students, which is undermining the
teaching & learning
 Introductory courses on ICT and educational technology in ITE are like
a brief walk in the Hong Kong museum of history (does not make you a
“local”)
 Majority of ITE staff are strangers to digital culture, some actively and
publicly hostile towards “digital”
 “Digital” activities have been established widely only in educational
bureaucracy (campus information systems, e-gradebooks in schools)
 Best practice does not “accumulate”

4. Scaffolding
 “Scaffolding is the support given during the learning process,
which is tailored to the needs of the student with the intention
of helping the student achieve his/her learning goals” (Sawyer
2006)
 Scaffolding is gradually fading, while student takes increasingly
more responsibility for his/her learning
 Scaffolding can be provided by another person or by the
(software) system
 Affordances of the software: Maslow’s Law of Instrument (“If all
you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail")

5. Design-based research
 Wang & Hannafin (2005): “a systematic but flexible
methodology aimed to improve educational practices through
iterative analysis, design, development, and implementation,
based on collaboration among researchers and practitioners in
real-world settings, and leading to contextually-sensitive design
principles and theories”
 Researchers intervene to the process under study
 Open-minded exploration of “what could be”
 Multivocal, participatory process using mixed-methods
approach

6. The concept of eDidaktikum
 Controlled environment, scaffolding towards digital culture, PLE
 Culture of sharing: communities for courses, ad-hoc groups, projects
 Annotating learning resources, blog posts etc: taxonomies based on
curriculum, ITE program, educational sciences
 Competence-based assessment: connect taxonomies with learning
outcomes and resources
 Organisation: consortium involves all ITE providers in Estonia
 Technology: CMS Drupal extended with our own plugins
 Learning analytics: Learning Locker LRS (TinCan API)

7. Learning analytics

8. Exploring the potential of eDidatikum
 Prototype of eDidaktikum was piloted in January –
May 2014, this week the new version has been
taken into use in more than 10 ITE courses
 Gathering feedback from users
 Sustainability strategy: software development
continues even after ending the project funding
 Integration with a wider “digital ecosystem”:
personal blogs, SSO, SIS, CMS, teachers portal
Koolielu, Finnish-Estonian Educational Cloud