Let me introduce Open Education… Facilitating prospective teachers’ understanding of Open Education through an AI-based tool

Open Educational Resources (OERs), first defined by UNESCO (2011) as “any educational material that can be used, adapted, and shared without restriction”, are central to promote access and inclusion. The EU still expresses the importance of open education (https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/what-open education_en) as a driver in the innovation of educational provision, reducing the barriers to access to quality education. However, embracing OER is still a badly understood and little practised approach (Ossiannilsson et al., 2020). In this presentation, we explore ENCORE, a tool for undergraduate and prospective teachers designed to embrace open education. As mediational tool (Ghislandi et al., 2013), we hypothesised that it could enhance prior pedagogical knowledge and values to move towards an open educational perspective. ENCORE combines AI-driven tools to retrieve relevant open educational resources to improve the teaching learning process. Its main goal is to guide educators in designing courses to address contemporary challenges such as digitalization, climate change, and post-COVID economic recovery (Raffaghelli et al., 2023). Two project-based workshops on ENCORE were implemented, with 64 participants. A pre-post test (student’s t-test) based on EU recommendation (OpenEdu Framework, Inamorato et al., 2016) shows relevant results. The subscales “OER knowledge,"" “Using OER,” and “Understanding and contribution to Open Knowledge” were significant at the cut-off level of < .001 (df = 63, t = 9.43, 9.83, 7.22, respectively). Moreover, the UTAUT scale was applied, observing that the most important variables for this sample were, in decreasing order: 1) performance expectation (avg. score 15.4) and behavioural intentions (15.1); 2) social influences (13), facilitating conditions (12.9) and effort expectation (12.3). This means that for the participants, the impact of using ENCORE to embrace an open educational perspective is relevant. The results show the validity of ENCORE for the initial teachers’ training (undergraduate level) to embrace an open educational perspective.