The VOCAL - Vocational Online CollAboration for Learning project aims to support vocational education and training in Europe through providing training opportunity for HE and VET teachers to experience and to develop skills in online collaborative learning.Education organizations need to network and collaborate in order to meet the challenges of the diversification of learners, the opening up of education, and the preparedness to merge international and intercultural learner groups and to provide learning services for work-based learners. (C)VET and higher education institutions should be digitally competent in order to meet these challenges and provide quality learning services, with the special focus on digitally and pedagogically competent teachers and trainers. HE and VET teachers need skills and educational practices to use new methods, techniques and tools to attract young generations of learners and to provide them with inclusive, active learning possibilities using online collaboration tools. The project aims to foster the open collaboration of teachers and trainers to design online, open and collaborative learning activities for diverse target groups embedding digital, social, and intercultural competences.In order to meet this aim, teachers and trainers will develop skills to digitalise quality learning resources, to design online collaborative learning activities embedding digital, social, and intercultural competence development, and to tutor international, intercultural diverse learner groups. They will collaborate online when designing an open curriculum for diverse international learner groups, and they will establish open educational practices for future references. The aim will be reached through the following objectives 1. To develop training material for teachers and trainers on a) Digitalization of quality learning resources; b) Designing online collaborative learning activities embedding digital, social and intercultural competence development; c)Tutoring international, intercultural and diverse learner groups. Openly available, high quality curriculum will be adapted and developed for international, intercultural diverse target groups in the form of open educational resources (theoretical part) through mutual collaboration of teachers and trainers from all consortium institutions. All together 6 courses will be (re)developed using ICT portal allowing open access and open learning.2. To train teachers and trainers during short-term mobility visits on the above topics.All together 24 staff members from consortium institutions (4 staff members per institution) will be trained and will achieve competences on digitalization of learning material, international collaborative open curriculum designing and tutoring international diverse learner groups.3. To (re)design quality and open curriculum for international, intercultural diverse target groups in the form of open educational resources through mutual collaboration of teachers and trainers from all consortium institutions. 4. To develop ICT portal for training material development, for designing open curriculum and collaborative learning activities, for implementing learning and presenting learning results as open educational practices and publish them.The project will also organise 10 national multiplier events in Hungary, Germany, Spain, Lithuania and Latvia to raise awareness for teachers, trainers and learners from diverse target groups to present the 6 (re)developed courses.This project aims to have a positive impact on education modernization and quality improvement on local, regional, national and European levels. First, it will contribute to opening up formal curriculum. Curriculum openness will allow instant feedback from all potential target learners in the form of commenting, tagging, liking and following. Moreover, opening up curriculum will contribute to development of open content licensing and development of open educational resources on local, regional and national levels.Quality assurance of learning services will be another important impact at local, regional and national, and European levels. The project consortium is built from outstanding European institutions. They will collaborate on forms of curriculum designing, will allow derivatives open courses, will create and adapt them, and will reuse them. Potential learners of the courses will have a new offer of learning possibly - in different European languages. This will feed the needs of labour market. In addition, such collaboration in open curriculum development would ensure high level internationalization of learning service development activities and collaboration. Academic activities that teachers will implement will lead to the development of tolerance, interpersonal values and intercultural dialogue, which will have direct positive impact upon trans-national and trans-regional collaboration.
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.