Maria Do Carmo Teixeira Pinto

During the COVID-19 pandemic, most Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) across the globe moved towards “emergency online education”, experiencing a metamorphosis that advanced their capacities and competencies as never before. Teaching and Learning Centers (TLCs), the internal units that promote sustainable transformations, can play a key role in making this metamorphosis last. Existing models for TLCs have defined the competencies that they could help develop, focusing on teachers’, students’, and managers’ development, but have mislead aspects such as leadership, organizational processes, and infrastructures. This paper evaluates the PROF-XXI framework, which offers a holistic perspective on the competencies that TLCs should develop for supporting deep and sustainable transformations of HEIs. The framework was evaluated with 83 participants from four Latin American institutions and used for analyzing the transformation of their teaching and learning practices during the pandemic lockdown. The result of the analysis shows that the PROF-XXI framework was useful for identifying the teaching and learning competencies addressed by the institutions, their deficiencies, and their strategic changes. Specifically, this study shows that most institutions counted with training plans for teachers before this period, mainly in the competencies of digital technologies and pedagogical quality, but that other initiatives were created to reinforce them, including students’ support actions.

Authenticity and transparency constitute two essential dimensions in the digital assessment of competences. Authenticity emphasises the importance of the complexity inherent to online assessment tasks related to real life contexts and are recognised as relevant by students, teachers and potential employers. Transparency has to do with the students’ involvement in the assessment tasks, through the democratisation and knowledge of the used strategies. Self-, co- and peer assessment are powerful instruments in the transparency operationalisation. The current study presents the peer assessment (PA) implementation process in a first cycle university degree curricular unit, in online context. The study was planned according to the following purposes: (a) to identify peer assessment potentialities and constraints in first cycle university degrees; (b) to analyse the questions that are brought forward among students by the application of a scoring rubric; (c) to reflect on the obtained results, aiming at the improvement of the implementation process and its applicability to other curricular units. In this essay, the authors present and discuss the obtained results, and propose recommendations to improve the quality of the peer assessment process.

MOOC “Competências digitais para professores”: uma prática formativa inovadora