Teacher education in the emergency: a MOOC-inspired teacher professional development strategy grounded in critical digital pedagogy and pedagogy of care

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic started off a process that would drastically change the ways to teach and learn, deepening and accelerating the relationship between technologies and educational processes, reshaping the Higher Education scenario. The emergency challenged Universidad de la República, the main public university in Uruguay, which in turn designed and implemented Emergency Remote Teaching, that allowed the continuity of Higher Education, minimizing academic impacts. Within this frame of action, the Virtual Learning Environments Program elaborated a Contingency Plan for teaching and learning, with an approach that considered Pedagogy of Care and Critical Digital Pedagogy. One of the actions implemented was the Teacher Professional Development Course “Teaching Online in Emergency Conditions”. This experience constitutes a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) -inspired course in Udelar. The article describes this innovative experience in Teacher Professional Development, presents the theoretical basis and methodological approach, the process and main decisions concerning the course design. Also, it describes the achievements of the experience, with the objective of identifying potential benefits of Teacher Professional Development initiatives based on MOOCs in the frame of emergency conditions. It analyzes teachers’ contributions and interactions during the course to assess appropriation of educational principles, methodologies and tools applied to online course redesign in the light of Critical Digital Pedagogy and Pedagogy of Care. The initiative ended up being an enriching alternative to approaching Teacher Professional Development, emphasizing its relevance in the context of rapid response to the transition to Emergency Remote Teaching. This experience adds up empirical data, to a necessary accumulation that would in time, allow more generalizable appreciations.