The Covid-19 pandemic has served to accelerate a shift already well underway in some institutions and brings them a greater sense of urgency to demonstrate greater value. Schools now face new pressures to provide an educational experience that is engaging, motivating and effective, regardless of how it is delivered. As schools may stay closed across many countries again, many students and teachers have to adapt to a new reality of remote learning. Online teaching and learning, like the newest form of distance education today, will lead to new, different, and more relevant outcomes. Teaching online requires specialized skill sets including the understanding of how to conduct classes in a virtual environment, knowing when and how to use video conferencing, share content, respond to students’ submissions. Software and technology are also changing very rapidly, and our schools want to keep up with these developments. One of the key challenges in online teaching is how to assess students remotely, to prevent them from cheating, using other materials, or accessing the web on other devices during the test. Online assessments are a critical part of distance learning and should be undertaken with the same level of care and rigor that teachers put into creating their learning content. Therefore, we intend to focus on introducing effective pedagogical strategies for online teaching rather than the technology itself. The general objective of our project is to motivate and help teachers to use online teaching to become a normal part of the educational process in our schools. The more specific objective is to suggest and recommend for implementation a model of assessing students remotely. By using this approach, students might gain enhanced learning outcomes. To achieve and fulfill the objectives, we plan to develop these main outputs: a) Manual for teachers containing curriculum resources for teachers, their professional development resources, digital tools for supporting online teaching and tools for collaboration b) Guide for assessment focused on testing options, methods and software tools c) Live resources for inspiration – sharing experiences with remote teaching, learning and assessing. During the project lifetime, we will organize two physical staff training events and two virtual, an online workshop for students of all our schools and two transnational meetings for monitoring project progress.
The general objective of our project was to motivate and help teachers to use online teaching to become a normal part of the educational process in our schools and to motivate students to be active in the learning process and be attractive to the international and national labor market. In our project, we set the key project objectives: - to initiate a process of professional development of teachers by joint work among partner schools. For this reason, we created materials that would help them overcome possible challenges that distance teaching, like a new phenomenon in our schools, brings. We needed to share our experiences with using different pedagogical approaches for effective online teaching. The partnership of teachers at the EU level was a solid solution for exchanging good practices and for peer support and thus increasing the quality and effectiveness of online teaching/learning in our schools - to facilitate teachers' online teaching and implement a model of assessing students remotely. Working together with partners, we were discussing how: - to integrate online teaching and assessment successfully and in high quality. Transitioning to online teaching involves changing the way of organizing teaching materials and the way of delivering these materials. It involves being comfortable with using technology and willing to learn about new teaching methods, resources and tools. The partners prepared a database of pedagogical methods and tricks, examples of online aids and tips and tricks for assessing students. The drafts of them were developed during two Learning/teaching/training events - to motivate students to be active in the learning process and be attractive to the international and national labor market. Well-prepared teachers guarantee that students are motivated more to learn. Using many digital resources and new pedagogical methods and approaches for teaching increases the interest of students in given topics of study. So the partners prepared a database of tips and tricks for positive reactions, that have proven successful for them and attracted students' attention.
The “Online Schooling” project was from the beginning a year project that was extended to 16 months because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even with this challenge partners reached their main objectives. Till the end of the project, we saw the importance of sharing experiences with distance education that involves changing the way of organizing teaching materials and the way of delivering these materials, being comfortable with using technology and a willingness to learn about new teaching methods, resources, and tools. Our partnership comprises five schools from Europe – Norway, Cyprus, Turkey, Estonia and the Czech Republic. It ensured involved teachers the drive to implement this method to enhance effective teaching and learning. Distance education principles are and will be one of the important new trends in teaching and learning and implemented within all European schools. Developed materials contribute to the goal greatly. We prepared a collection of free, ready-to-use resources for online teaching and teachers´ professional development - applicable for any school and any study area. In total teachers can find 14 examples of pedagogical methods and tricks, 4 examples of apps and digital tools for teachers, 16 examples of tips and tricks for troubleshooting and 17 examples of assessment tools, incl. apps and grading. Beyond the project, we will still invite others to share to expand this database. Project results impacted greatly our target groups: - 5 schools that improved teachers´ professional development and learners´ education procedures - 32 teachers who took part in 2 Learning/teaching/training activities - Teachers tested at least three apps and assessment tools (that were new for them) with at least 300 students - Various other groups and stakeholders were reached through dissemination activities (about 500 participants through on/offline and other channels). Partners have created these materials for teachers and providers across the EU: - Manual for teachers that helps teachers to identify and use an appropriate methodology in implementing online teaching - Guide for assessment that enables teachers to choose assessment tools, apps and practical examples for remote monitoring and assessing students´ work - Live resources containing videos that document teachers´ and students´ experiences with distance teaching and learning. Even if there are possibly other sources for online teaching and learning, we see from our partners and other colleagues around Europe that tools for online teaching will continue to be a relevant and good way to ensure the quality of VET learners' education. We see potential in possible continuation areas to work on. Other project ideas were already discussed and plans are set for new partnerships where further distance teaching problems will be explored more deeply and dealt with from different points of view.