Teaching and Recognition of Skills in the Digital Era Through OER-Based Personalized and Gamified Learning: The ENCORE Project

In the post-digital world, educators are tasked with navigating a plethora of resources to build effective interventions for ever-changing skill requirements. Intelligent systems can assist them by recommending educational content, providing personalized learning experiences and automating time-consuming tasks, allowing educators to focus on creating engaging and interactive learning experiences. However, it is also important that educators are equipped to fruitfully engage with such systems in a way that enhances their pedagogy and teaching practices as far as help them to deal with societal challenges. The project ENCORE aims to support this shift by developing an intelligent system that selects quality Open Educational Resources (OERs) to support the pedagogical design and teaching around key skills affected by societal macro-trends, i.e. Green, Digital and Entrepreneurial (GDE) skills. The project has two phases: a data-driven phase using Natural Language Processing to match skills with relevant OERs and a qualitative/expert-driven phase for developing pedagogical guidelines and testing the system in real educational contexts. This paper describes the main tenets of the ENCORE project and the research actions taken to support learners and educators in using OERs and targeting skills most relevant to the new macro-trends of digitalization, climate change, and post-COVID economic recovery challenges.