Welcome to our MOOC “Development of Digital Competence in Pre-School Education”! 

We are living in an era of omnipresent digital technologies. These transformations affect our lifestyle, work, communication, hobbies, learning, and recreation habits.

On the one hand, technology is becoming more accessible, and we need less time to perform some tasks. Knowledge, data, and materials are literally at the end of our fingertips. As soon as we enter any word in the search engine line, the world of information opens to us. On the other hand, we need to constantly learn new things to cope with technological and digital advancements, which is a never-ending challenge. Even the most practical innovations can cause stress, overload, and overwhelm people.

This stress keeps increasing as soon as we start thinking of the younger generation who have zero experience of the world before the advent of digital technologies. As a result, they take technology for granted. Sometimes, children can become too involved in virtual reality and obsessed with social media or video games. These and many other threats can cause physical health challenges connected with extra weight, poorer eyesight, or sedentary lifestyle, bad sleeping habits, or mental disbalance caused by brain overload. More and more often, young children become victims of online abuse or money-stealing schemes, and this is the adults’ task to prepare the children for the challenges of today and tomorrow. 

We are an enthusiastic group of four universities and three kindergartens from Estonia, Germany, Slovenia, and Latvia. We united our forces to produce an open online course that will help kindergarten teachers and parents of kids develop their skills and prepare the younger generation for the digital society of tomorrow so that they can enjoy all its benefits to the maximum, avoid potential digital stress, find balance, and enjoy a harmonious life. 

To achieve maximum output, we will frequently ask you to reflect on your previous experience and the material covered. To ensure that the new knowledge, skills, and attitudes stay with you for a long time, we are asking you to start a MOOC diary. At the end of every part of the course, you will have a reflection exercise called “Dear Diary,” in which we will ask you to put down, sketch, or itemize your learning experience. By the end of the MOOC, you will have several reflection passages that will help you understand the progress you have made in this MOOC. If you want a certificate that you finished this MOOC, we will ask you to send a 1-2 page reflection on the MOOC topics.

To produce this MOOC, we developed our materials and used some materials created by others. We exclusively used only open-source materials under Creative Commons, and we always tried to reference the author(s) to show their contribution to the world of knowledge and avoid any unintentional plagiarism.

We hope the e-course will help you acquire the digital and pedagogical skills required for successful teaching professionals and caring parents. We hope that with our MOOC, it will be easier for you to support your children on the way to ultimate success! 

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This communication (website) reflects the views only of the author and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.