From face-to-face to distance spaces: how to teach and learn? Erasmus Project

Project Title

From face-to-face to distance spaces: how to teach and learn?

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 : Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Open and distance learning; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

At a time when more than 1.5 billion learners and more than 63 million teachers have been confined throughout the world and have not been able to reach the physical spaces of learning, the debate around the distance teaching/learning process (a process that is not opposed to in-person, but corresponds to a different space-time) has been revived. For example, the initial results of the monitoring of the social and economic impacts of COVID-19 conducted by Brown and Harvard Universities (from February to August 2020) showed that for learners from middle and low income families, the distance teaching/learning process did not meet their learning needs and put a large proportion of learners at a disadvantage. This perceived and globally shared situation can be explained, in part, by the fact that our education systems and, first and foremost, our teachers had not been trained and were not prepared to deal with such a situation.

More generally, outside the specific context of the current health crisis, different variables are responsible for the difficulties encountered by teachers and learners in the distance teaching/learning process. The first observation made concerns the teaching/learning processes, where both face-to-face and distance teaching/learning processes are two different modalities. Thus, reproducing the face-to-face modalities at a distance does not necessarily lead to positive learning results. Indeed, it is necessary to rethink the practices (pedagogical and digital), to question those practices that best enable distance or hybrid teaching, and to train and prepare teacher trainers and teachers enabling them to adapt their teaching/learning process to different situations and contexts.

Thus, the main objective of this project is to train teacher trainers (the target audience of this project) from the three partner countries to be able to adapt to the different modalities of distance or hybrid teaching/learning processes by taking into account different situations and contexts. This project aims to facilitate the implementation of training sessions for teacher trainers from the three partner countries in order to create a domino effect of trainings that start with the trainers, continue to the teachers’ community of practice and end with the impacts in the learning experience of the learners.

To do this, it is proposed to train and support them in the co-design of an Open Source toolbox in order to facilitate the implementation of distance or hybrid teaching/learning processes. This deliberately open and participative process aims to meet the real needs expressed by the actors in the field, working in accordance with their trainers in order to meet the challenges of a complementary and successful hybridization of the teaching and learning process, and consequently the training of these methods.

The methodology that will be used has three phases: 1) the identification of the practices of trainers (thanks to the training centers of the three partner countries) and teachers (thanks to the eTwinning Network), 2) the co-design (with the teacher trainers) of a toolkit to facilitate the implementation of distance or hybrid teaching/learning processes, and 3) the training sessions of teacher trainers.

At the end of this project, two productions will be disseminated through the different communication channels of the partner countries: 1) a toolkit to facilitate the implementation of a distance or hybrid learning process, and 2) a guide of methods and pedagogies to facilitate the training of teacher trainers in the implementation of distance or hybrid teaching/learning processes.

As far as the results are concerned, the objective is to make available 1) the toolbox to facilitate the implementation of distance or hybrid teaching/learning processes designed during this project, and 2) the pedagogical methods and resources to the educational community in the three partner countries through the training centers of the partner organizations (more than 850,000 teachers), and more broadly, to the ministries of education of the partner countries to make these resources for trainers and teachers easily transposable to the European territory and to make them evolve (and adapt) continuously.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 107920 Eur

Project Coordinator

RESEAU CANOPE & Country: FR

Project Partners

• LE FOREM
• Administrative service of the Ministry of Education