THE IMPACT OF OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN EDUCATING CITIZENS ON EMERGENCY RESPONSE.

The paper presents some of the main findings of a desk research phase conducted within the project Virtual Centre for Education and Training of Citizens in Cases of Natural Disasters through Serious Games (MEDGAME). The purpose of this project is to educate people in an innovative and exciting way, to acquire a proactive attitude, based on knowledge and appropriate skills and proper behaviour in emergencies caused by natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes, building solid scientific foundations and creating a Virtual Centre for education and training of citizens in cases of natural disasters through the Serious Games built on scenarios based on these disasters. The research question of the present study concerns the current situation regarding the social dimension of emergency management in the sense of using a responsible and trained population through online educational resources to act individually or together with other members of the community, along with governmental specialized organizations in various risk situations caused by natural disasters. The main effort is focused on diagnosing the potential use of online educational resources for training of the population of Romania to respond to emergency situations. As main conclusions our study revealed that there is no concerted and systematic development of online educational resources in preparing the population to react in emergency situations. Instead of this we can notice for most of situations there are just some presentation of brochures and action guides for natural disasters. According to studies on the use of online technology and Internet access, in Romania there is a large digital divide compared to other European Union countries; in this respect, one of the future directions of action should be to promote educational resources among potential users. We are convinced that besides the obvious informative and formative valences of using online technologies should not be overlooked that the modern information technology could significantly increase the attractiveness of training the people for emergency situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]