Citizens with enough digital competences is a clear objective of the EU for the future. OECD Report “Skills for a Digital World” (2016) states that the increase of use of digital technologies creates a clear change in the demand for skills, which present two major challenges to skills development systems, including formal education, training and the recognition of skills acquired through non-formal learning.

First, while there is awareness that the skills profile of citizens and workers will be very different than in the past, the skills of the future are difficult to identify with certainty due fast technological changes.

The second challenge is to ensure that, once changes in skills have been identified, skills development systems adjust sufficiently fast to match new skills demands.

So the project is addressing three structural areas that are pivotal to achieving positive outcomes in digital competence acquisition, namely; the skills of university professors working in education faculties; the digital competences of future teachers in primary education together with measuring the evolution of the acquisition of those competences and finally the use of cocreation of learning materials between teachers and students in Education Faculties as an innovative method for learning by doing.

Target groups are teachers and students of Education faculties, in order to assure good digital skills and competences of future schools teachers, who will get a similar process with their students, in order to have citizens in the EU with good digital competences.

DIGGING overall objective is to improve the digital competences of future teachers, and for that the project will develop, in a set of overlapping actions, the following results:

• Create a common framework of digital competences for countries in the project, including a set of baseline test questionnaires to measure the evolution of acquisition of those competences.
• Create the Technical environment to create the Statistical Analysis System of the project.
• Create a service of guidance and training for Faculty Professors dealing with digital competences of their students, the future primary teachers, and with active methodologies.
• Create a repository of resources co-created by teachers and students dealing with digital skills and competences, and selected from the results of the baseline tests.

To achieve all the results and the project’s objectives, the consortium will split the work to do into a series of overlapping actions as follows:

• Action 1 – Digital Competences Framework: all partners will present a concise report that shows how digital competences for teachers are handled in their countries. This will be the base to elaborate the “DIGGING Taxonomy for Digital Competences”, which will lead to the creation of the project’s baseline tests.
• Action 2 – DIGGING Environment Implementation: The running of the baseline tests will be done by using a “big data” system that will compile
  and administrate all the project results. This system is integrated in Moodle, the project LMS.
• Action 3 – Gathering the learning evolution data: Action 1 and 2 prepares all the environment for teachers to run the baseline tests with their
  students each 5-6 months while in the University. All the results will be treated so that teachers have data for their classes, and the project gets accumulated (and anonymous) data at European, national and regional levels.
• Action 4 – Organize digital OERs for improving: The project partners, with the information of the baseline tests, will recognise the areas in which university students have the most difficulties and will create a repository of resources that they can use to improve their scores in the following tests. These repository will include resources both external and created by partners (5/each partner).
• Action 5 – Training the trainers: In order to train university lecturers in the subject matter of the project, different modules will be created within the Moodle platform. These modules will work on both digital competences and active methodologies. In addition, there will be guidelines for the use of the whole project. This action of the partners will be useful for both university teachers and their students, as the latter will be future teachers.

Dissemination and exploitation actions will be undertaken by all partners at appropriate times throughout the project life-cycle.