The ENCORE Approach. Pedagogy of an AI-driven system to integrate OER in Higher Education & VET

The ENCORE approach combines AI-driven tools to retrieve relevant Open Educational Resources in order to improve teaching and learning. Through these means, it main goal is to guide educators in designing courses with learning outcomes directly linked to the skills required to address contemporary challenges such as digitalization, climate change, and post-COVID economic recovery. Therefore, the tools put emphasis in yielding and organising the resources through the lens of the DGE (the Digital, Entrepreneurial, and Green) Frameworks developed by the EU Commission to address the above-mentioned challenges. The Pedagogical guidelines refer to a set of principles and recommendations to engage with the ENCORE system, organised in at least three technological layers: a search engine based on the DGE skills; a database that aggregates open educational resources under the DGE skills; and educational enablers that support design for learning by adopting a number of pedagogical concepts, such as the Bloom taxonomy. Therefore, the ENCORE system caters to educators, learners, and other stakeholders with several relevant educational instruments: digital, entrepreneurial, and green competences as frontiers of knowledge in a society that goes through transformation and faces global inequities and climate change as a key challenge; open education as a philosophy for an inclusive and participatory practise of teaching and learning; and the need to embed appropriately and effectively such ideas into the educational practise. The ENCORE system, with its different layers, invites educators and learners to reflect on their own teaching practises and to support significant learning experiences. As a whole, the system can potentially trigger professional learning and development by the educators and trainers, as well as by those adopting each and/or any of the features. However, to that end, further interaction with educators to generate learning scenarios and to imagine the ENCORE system in contextualised situations is necessary. Professional learning is based on practise; practise is based on social approaches to doing and learning to do. The present document introduces the key areas of reflection to develop pedagogical guidelines, as an instrument that makes of ENCORE not only a usable system, but an approach that encourages staff/educators’ development. In this regard, we aim not only to explain and motivate ENCORE usage but also to promote institutional strategies embracing the principles of ENCORE, as a human-machine collaborative environment. The document starts with relevant information to understand what Open Education is and what it takes to teachers and students to engage with such an approach. In this regard, a little bit of history on Open Education is retraced in order to introduce problems as search and retrieval, quality of OERs and effective usage in Higher Education and VET. We also consider how OER have been connected to the Educators Professional Development and to the Students’ Empowerment, making it an approach worth to be considered in a post-pandemic, post-digital scenario. Hence, the document presents the ENCORE approach, considering its several components as integrated and smart system supporting educators to find and implement OER into the teaching and learning process. Suggestions of usage come with several exercises made by the ENCORE partnership to generate learning scenarios that deal with the DGE competence. Furthermore, the exercises offer some ideas to focus on: a) the types of possible interaction with the OER (for designing, for preparing resources, for teaching/delivering training, for learning); b) planning appropriate learning goals while interacting with the ENCORE pedagogical enablers, adopting Bloom's taxonomy. The reader must consider that this is an “in-progress” work and set the basis to expand the pedagogical guidelines as an instrument to make the most of ENCORE, conceived more than as a system and its interface. ENCORE can be considered an intelligent system that supports teachers and trainers in the development of DGE skills through open educational resources, but as said, this is only the starting point. ENCORE will only thrive as an approach through progressive loops of usage, comment, experimentation, and human creativity, contributing to solutions that bring to the fore the fruitful ways in which the system can trigger educational transformation. Only through these relevant experiences and cases delving on human-machine collaboration will we accomplish the more complex idea of ENCORE as a pedagogical approach.