Vocational Online Collaboration for Active Learning Erasmus Project

Project Title

Vocational Online Collaboration for Active Learning

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Access for disadvantaged; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

Our project designed and offered HE and VET teachers pieces of training to acquire skills and competencies to design online, open and collaborative learning activities for diverse target groups, embedding digital, social, and intercultural competences. We offer training materials piloted by 24 teachers delegated by the partner institutions as well as testimonies by teachers and developers who participated in our training and able to offer firsthand experience on using their newly acquired skills for the first time. The aim of the project was to offer a solution to the need of teachers to know how to network and collaborate to meet the challenges of the diversification of the learners, how to open up their teaching practice and be digitally competent in doing so.
The VOCAL – Vocational Online CollAboration for Learning project successfully realised its aim to offer learning materials and full Moodle courses as well as an easy to digest form of peer learning through testimonies by the teachers and trainers in VET and HE.
The aim was reached through the following main results:
1. Three training materials are developed and are available as an open educational resource under Attribution-ShareAlike license for all the teachers and learners. Upon wish and need the course materials are easily transferred to any website or learning environment. a) First training material is about the digitalisation of analog content, by planning, developing and producing it. The material consists of three units, where the first unit includes the history of digitalisation (also different templates available), and the second unit about the “conversion” process. b) Second training material consists of three units and provides information about social and cultural differences considering that cultural differences have a significant impact on the learning process nowadays. c) Third training material is about tutoring international intercultural and diverse learner groups. It consists of 5 units, providing examples and templates, the basic structure for an online course. All three courses are freely available through the VOCAL Moodle and the theoretical parts are downloadable in pdf directly from the project website.
2. Teachers participating in our training tested their newly acquired skills by participating in international open development work where they re-developed one of their existing learning materials (6 re-developed courses are the results). These short courses were then peer-reviewed and piloted in the delegating institutions to gain experience in open educational practices. By the end of August 2018, almost all pilots have been finished successfully with more than 50 open badges awarded to participants upon completion. Teachers and trainers gave very positive feedback on the activity stating how useful it was, and all claimed that they would recommend this kind of activity to their colleagues. It turned out, that collaboration and open educational practices are very challenging in an online international environment, but also very rewarding as well. One of the key messages that trainers expressed: “Students need constant feedback and motivation in order to keep going and the more collaborative activities are, the better (though it might be challenging to manage them)”. The participating institutions were asked and decided on the openness of their re-developed courses and decided on the Attribution-ShareAlike license. The courses can be freely accessible through the project website, with a guest account (no registration is needed). Some activities require registration to view (limitations in Moodle), registration is free.
3. The VOCAL partnership put a great emphasis on documenting the developments taking place during the project. The development of new learning materials, training and testing the new skills by re-developing courses in an international collaborative way, provided opportunities to collect feedback from participants, collaborating teachers, developers of the materials and even learners and students who took part in the piloting. Our main aim was to shed light on the process of how Open Educational Resources (OER) become Open Educational Practices (OEP). Within the development of intellectual output: Testimonies of OEPs, we recorded video interviews and provided feedback questionnaires to collect the feedback of our target group. There are three main collections of these testimonies: a) Regarding every redeveloped course, there is an introductory video where the developers talk about the aims of the courses and their work. It is followed up with a review interview with screen captures in the course to give insights on the achievements, plus there is a description of the OEP entertained in the course, with the explanation of what it was and how it was realised. b) Discussion after piloting with developers and tutors about lessons learned shared as a video. And finally, c) Categorisation of OERs.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 279384 Eur

Project Coordinator

BUDAPESTI MUSZAKI ES GAZDASAGTUDOMANYI EGYETEM & Country: HU

Project Partners

• OGRES TEHNIKUMS
• Lietuvos nuotolinio ir e. mokymosi (LieDM) asociacija
• UNIVERSIDAD DE LA IGLESIA DE DEUSTO ENTIDAD RELIGIOSA
• VYTAUTO DIDZIOJO UNIVERSITETAS
• Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg Heilbronn