Promoting Digital Skills for Austrian Employees through a MOOC: Results and Lessons Learned from Design and Implementation

Sarah Edelsbrunner,Philipp Leitner,Karin Steiner,Sandra Schön,Martin Ebner

doi:10.3390/educsci12020089

Sarah Edelsbrunner, Philipp Leitner + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12020089

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Journal: Education sciences	Publication Date: Jan 27, 2022
Citations: 6	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Graz University of Technology

Abstract

Digital skills are now essential, not only in information and communications technology (ICT) jobs, but for employees across all sectors. The aim of this article is to detail how employees’ digital skills can be fostered through a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), how such an offer is used and what the effects of such a measure are. Using an approach oriented at action research and design-based research activities, the authors describe the basics of their finding on existing European competence frameworks for digital skills and European projects that used MOOCs, the development and design of the MOOC, the evaluation on the basis of learning analytics insights and a questionnaire, as well as a reflection. The MOOC was offered as Open Educational Resources (OER) on the Austrian MOOC platform iMOOX.at from March to April 2021, with 2083 participants, of whom 381 fully completed the course (at end of June 2021) and 489 filled out the final questionnaire.

Highlights

The Need for Austrian Employees to Acquire Digital SkillsInformation and communications technology (ICT) skills are required in more and more workplaces, even in jobs not traditionally associated with information and communications technology (ICT) skills or investment
The Digital Skills Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), based on DigComp 2.2 AT, was designed to upskill 500 Austrian private sector employees and complements the European strategy for meeting the needs created by the digitalization of the labor market
This paper answered the questions of how the MOOC was developed and implemented, how it was used and what the potential effects of such an educational intervention are, using a four-step action research design as the background for the description, analysis and reflection

Summary

Introduction

The Need for Austrian Employees to Acquire Digital SkillsInformation and communications technology (ICT) skills are required in more and more workplaces, even in jobs not traditionally associated with ICT skills or investment. Current offers for employees are often only comprised of “training sessions” in using specific programs or systems, and neglect more general digital competence that can be transferred to other settings [1] In this context, the project “Digital Skills for 500 private employees in Austria”, a cooperation of ABIF (an independent social science research and consulting institute with a focus on applied research), GPAdjp (The Union of Private Sector Employees, Printing, Journalism, and Paper) and Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) aimed to provide training in basic, general digital skills for Austrian employees in the private sector using an eight-week Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). The purpose of this contribution and research is to explore and systematically describe how a MOOC for digital skills for employees can be planned and

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