The current educational crisis puts teachers, students, universities, and research organizations under pressure to expand digital learning and teaching offers rapidly.

In this process, access to sound pedagogy and participation in education dialogues have taken on an increasingly global dimension – even though many teachers and schools still lack access to scientifically and pedagogically validated resources. Not only that, but education practitioners also face the challenge of accessing educational content that is adequate to their context and representative of their learning needs.

While the OER movement and OERs are gaining importance globally, and although there is a myriad of resources available, there is still much to advance concerning teacher professional development – especially when it comes to providing resources that value the autonomy and subjectivity of teachers, as well as the complex nature of teaching and learning in different contexts.

That is why dTeach aims to contribute with the UNESCO-backed movement of promoting Open Educational Resources (OER), by providing publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, remix, improve, and redistribute under open licenses. dTeach is made under the principles of being representative and tailored to the context of the Brazilian public schools. It is made to empower Brazilian teachers in their professional development.

We believe there is much room to create teaching and learning opportunities where contemporary education research is considered and reaches the classroom using collaborative perspectives instead of top-down and homogenized programs. In this changing environment, digitalization and blockchain technology opens up numerous perspectives for educational and academic access and collaboration, which exceed the geographical, political, and social boundaries of traditional teaching and learning.

dTeach promotes and supports the integration of digital collaboration formats in teaching and learning resource production within the framework of international teaching cooperation; the development of digital skills for students and teachers; extended access to international teaching and learning material for specific target groups (e.g. non-mobile students) and the formation of a community of practice. The exchange between educational content creators, scientists and teachers represents an interactive and cooperation-based bridge to the world and serves to systematically intensify international collaboration and shape them around new models of teaching and pedagogy. The teacher-oriented focus of dteach encourages engagement with the cultural context of other teachers and makes the digitally-based collaboration on teaching and learning resources a subject of the teaching-learning experience.

Below there is a summary of solutions brought by dteach: 

• An efficient process of resource production that ensures quality – community-driven, decentralization, several quality checkpoints, peer-reviewed, and based on proven expertise.
• Fair remuneration to the entire resource production chain: from authors and content creators, to scientists, to teachers and their classroom.
• Valorization of teacher’s profession by investing on them and their local initiatives towards innovation in the classroom.
• Diverse, contemporary, relevant, up to date, and open-source content that improves the quality of education and reaches teachers and their students.
• Provide capillarity to quality research in education, in order to access schools underserved by the states and other institutions.