Training Faculty on Blended Learning Erasmus Project

Project Title

Training Faculty on Blended 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 : 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; Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Open and distance learning

Project Summary

Spanning over two years, FABLE has as its aim to help higher education (HE) teaching staffs to design and implement blended learning while fully exploiting the advantages offered by this approach consisting of combining face-to-face teaching, live videoconferencing courses, online accessible recorded courses, micro-learning, and online self-training.
To reach this overall goal, the project will pursue and achieve the following objectives:
• Ceating a knowlege bank, to better identify the needs and expectations of students and trainees on the one side, professors, educators and trainers on the other side, regarding blended learning and training on blended learning. This will be done through online survey complemented with in-depth interviews of the large populations of students and trainees on the one side, professors, educators and trainers of the other side that the partners access directly. The achievement of this objective will result in the intellectual output IO1.
• Conceive and test a methodology to transform in-class courses into blended learning ones exploiting the benefits brought by this form of teaching, including a guide to distance learning tools. Built upon the needs and expectations identified, the methodology is aimed at providing a step-by-step ‘vade-mecum’ explaining to professors and trainers how they can design or transform their in-person courses into blended learning curricula according to the intended learning outcomes. The methodology will include a guide of the different tools used to digitalise courses. This accomplishment of this objective is concretised by IO2.
• Design, develop and implement a tool aimed at training faculty on blended training so to help them design courses for blended learning. The platform aims at a full integration of the learning and teaching experience in online and face-to-face combined settings. It will provide the eLearning platform with the resources for a high impact of replicability and sustainability. The result of this objective is IO3.
• Issue a white paper for education systems to help them steer the digital transformation of their teaching through effective performance indicators.
The project is aimed at emphasising and accelerating the movement toward digital courses that was considered with some reluctance before the Covid-19 crisis makes it a necessity.
If it is not considered only as a low-cost stopgap of traditional teaching, the benefits of blended learning are numerous:
• Personalisation: by adding self-training and virtual classes to in-class teaching, blended learning is training delivered at right amounts, at right moments. Training can now fit in a pocket and is becoming more and more convenient for us to travel. The training can therefore be consulted anywhere and at any time;
• It favours memory anchoring. By allowing shorter learning sessions distributed over time, it is much more effective than concentrated sessions;
• It promotes back-and-forth moves between knowledge acquisition and practical application during virtual class interclasses;
• It facilitates quality assessment: blended learning learners no longer simply acquire knowledge, but develops skills, making it easier to assess the upgrade of their skills;
• It suits digital natives and is adapted to increasingly technology-oriented learning methods;
• Social learning is encouraged, and a micro-community can be created around the training.
These benefits have shown to be efficient to reduce school dropouts and reengagement of people having left secondary education without graduation.
The consortium counts five HE organisations covering different disciplines – from business school to technology institutes, and generalist universities – , of different digitalisation maturity states and coming from different European horizons, from North to South, West to East. This will ensure a large coverage of disciplines, digital maturity levels and cultural backgrounds. The project includes additionally: i) a private company specialised in digital education, ii) a private company specialised in transfer technology from the academic world to the industrial sector.
The project is expected to greatly help partner organisations’ professors, educators and trainers digitalise their curricula in such a way that the resulting courses own added values as compared to in-person learning. Students and trainees having responded to the survey or interviews will better grasp the benefits of distance learning. On the mid-term, sharing a common methodology will help European HE and VET organisations develop harmonised blended learning programmes thus improve student and trainee exchanges all over Europe. On a longer term, FABLE will contribute to enhance the quality and quantity of blended learning programmes, thus their impacts on society, notably but not exclusively school dropout reduction and reengagement of not-graduated people.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 299937 Eur

Project Coordinator

INSTITUT DE PREPARATION A L’ADMINISTRATION ET A LA GESTION & Country: FR

Project Partners

• FH Münster University of Applied Sciences
• haikara
• UNIVERSIDAD INTERNACIONAL DE LA RIOJA SA
• LAPPEENRANNAN-LAHDEN TEKNILLINEN YLIOPISTO LUT
• INNOGATE TO EUROPE SL
• SZECHENYI ISTVAN UNIVERSITY