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INCLUSION AND EMPLOYABILITY THROUGH ELECTRIC VEHICLES TECHNOLOGY

2019-1-ES01-KA202-0640752019Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and trainingfinalized
Countries: ES|PT|TR|IT|RO|HR|LT · Grant: €192,820
Open and distance learningICT - new technologies - digital competencesInclusion - equity

Project summary

As teachers in public Secondary and Vocational Schools we have noticed the urgent need to pay attention to our younger students with special needs to learn efficiently, as they are constantly kicked off from the oficial educational system, just because of their special requirements. They are usually sent to Initial VET programmes, but although our laws mention "inclusion", these programmes are not really inclusive. They are not useful, as they do not offer our students the possibility of a real learning, to remain for longer periods within the system. Unfortunately, they are neither prepared to access our current labour market. From our teaching perspective, the curricular materials we have for these students do not fit their needs. They are usually motivated to minpulative activities , but not really for passive, rote learning. However, the publishing companies provide schools with useless books which are not useful with these students within the classroom. This situation causes frustration and continuous worries for teachers. Some of them have recently shared this feeling with other teaching professionals from different European countries during KA1 mobility projects. Moreover, from companies perspective, having agreements with our schools for internship programmes, they are really worried about the fact that our curricular materiales are not updated to allow our students to get the required abilities to work at their companies. Once again, these books do not fulfill the companies requirements for qualified workers. For all these reasons, we consider ourselves ready to take action and try to change this situation. We suggest designing and manufacture inclusive curricular materials for these students. They have to be as simple, interactive and attractive as possible, so they can contribute to cause the required motivation for them to finish their Inicial VET programmes. At the same time, they help their teachers to get motivated aswell. Among teachers, we usually share some individual activities which are successful within the classroom with these students. Now we propose to gather all of them, coming up from different schools and different countries, as our main objective is to help the development of high quality skills and competences for our teachers and students. Moreover, We want to offer them all to the rest of the society, where there are some professional groups clearly not updated to fulfill their jobs, and not ready to start a traditional training. We want to offer our inclusive materials to them in an open learning format (SPOOC) . On the basis of this common need, shared with hundreds of teachers from our association, we have chosen to make a proporsal for a first try of designing inclusive materials focusing on the Automotive branch of Car Maintenance. We detail here our open learning format proposal, which has to be plural, inclusive and offering constant updating, by means of ICT, manufacturing inclusive materials on a digital basis, designing a digital book (including 3D patterns, and models to be printed on 3D to favour "learning by doing") We assume that the option of ICT complements the topic itself: the electric vehicle.

Objectives

Our aim was to favour the development of high quality skills and competences among our teachers and students by developing interactive 3D materials and opening them to society. Likewise, we wanted to focus on some professionals or unemployed people from the automotive sector which need updating by designing an open source spooc training programme.

Background

We applied for this project due to the lack of specific materials for First level VET students related to the new technology of electric vehicles. Also we have detected the need for updating current workers at workshops who do not have any knowledge about this type of vehicles when dealing with their manipulation and fixing processes. So we applied for it with the intention to provide quality materials for both aims. To train students who usually are expelled from the system very quickly and to update workers who are forced to learn if they want to avoid being fired because their expertise has become useless with new technologies. To do this we try to combine ICT technologies to design the ebooks, the online training course and 3D printers opportunities.

Project partners (7)