The COVID 19 crisis led to lockdown of entire communities for months, closed schools and excluded pupils from attending classes. This triggered a need for educational institutions and teachers to quickly develop alternative forms of teaching. A key tool in the efforts to continue education became online-based education. The crisis ended up being a gigantic laboratory for testing the technical capacity, readiness and competence of educational institutions to offer online education on a large scale in a long period and the teachers' readiness for, and competencies in developing and designing educational material and courses as online teaching. The schools were not ready. The teaching many pupils and students were offered for weeks and months was of doubtful quality. It was difficult to maintain both the level of learning and the motivation among learners - and teachers. This was also the case for the partners behind this application consisting of four partners: A Danish youth education provider in the VET sector offering programs to pupils at the age of 15 and 16 based on the national curriculum for 10th class at primary school, a Danish private primary school, a Slovenian primary school and an Icelandic Municipality. It became obvious that online based teaching SHOULD NOT BE that teachers • simply upload and give students access to the material they had prepared for class-based and face-to-face teaching • communicate this material with the same methods and approaches they used in ordinary classroom settings. The target group of the project are teachers, their pupils and their educational leaders and the aim is : - Development, implementation and transfer of innovative practices, joint initiatives for collaboration, learning and developing digital technology in education. - Professionalization and professional development in education. Developing teachers’, learners and educational leaders’ digital skills to enhance the quality of virtual learning activities in education. -Strategic and professional use of ICT methodologies and virtual collaboration. In the implementation of our project, we will benefit from the findings in the research of teachers from two partner organisation: Their master thesis researched the understanding and use of digital technologies as a part of collaboration in teams, and how to design didactics and principals for hybrid forms of professional learning communities. (Leschly, Kjelgaard & Veiergang, 2020: Didactic design principles for hybrid professional learning communities - When digital technologies expand teachers' teamwork, 2020.) Drawing on research gained from the period of COVID19, questions of interest were: How do teachers understand and use digital technologies as a part of their collaboration in teams and how can these findings be the foundation for development of new didactical design principals for hybrid forms of professional learning communities. The 4 IOs: 1. Contextual clarification and establishment of online collaboration space for stakeholders. Methodology Guidelines. Establishing an online community for partners and other stakeholders. Survey and comparative analysis on partner schools. 2. Developing and designing common curricula with regard to enhancing the competences of teachers to work in hybrid learning communities. Courses and learning material. 3. Train the Trainers. Development of remediated and innovative digitally designed material 4. Testing, adjusting, and refining the developed remediated and innovative digitally designed material. Development of HLC Guide Participatory approaches involving teachers, pupils, leaders and ICT staff will be the methodology in developing tailored and attractive training activities and materials. A common professional online learning community using a common ICT-platform/program for the partners’ cross-cooperation will be designed and will increase the partners’ capacity to cooperate, communicate and share knowledge effectively during the project. Designing of basic local templates for each partner to establish a professional online learning community inside each organization will constitutes virtual learning environments in each of the participating organizations allowing us to develop and complete common learning activities for digital competencies across organizations. Doing this increases the level of virtual participation on each of the partnering schools and makes a better foundation for evaluating and understanding the effects of the project activities across organizations. The long-term benefits of the project will be Hybrid Learning Communities(HLC) at local schools some of them connected to larger transnational HLCs with a big potential for cooperation with schools cross borders and across pedagogical/didactical traditions. Teacher more competent in developing remediated and innovative digitally designed material. Better learning outcomes and more motivation among pupils.
The aim of the project was: - Development, implementation and transfer of innovative practices and joint initiatives for collaboration, learning and development regarding digital technology in education. - Professionalization and professional development in education. Developing teachers’, students’ - and educational leaders’ digital skills to enhance the quality of virtual learning activities in education. - Strategic and professional use of ICT methodologies and virtual collaboration. By implementing the project, the partnership wanted to further explore how teachers understand, use and benefit from digital technologies as a part of their collaboration in teams and how can these findings be the foundation for development of new didactical design principals for hybrid forms of professional learning communities? Also, the establishment of Hybrid Learning Communities and development of remediated and innovative digitally designed material was expected to have a big transnational potential. Material can be used immediately across borders, if designed for transnational use, e.g. by using the translation techniques available on YouTube and with teaching material introduced in video appetisers.
The COVID 19 crisis led to lock down of entire communities for months, closed schools and excluded pupils from attending classes. This triggered a need for educational institutions and teachers to quickly develop alternative forms of teaching. A key tool in the efforts to continue education became online-based education. The crisis ended up being a gigantic laboratory for testing the technical capacity, readiness and competence of educational institutions to offer online education on a large scale in a long period and the teachers' readiness for, and competencies in developing and designing educational material and courses as online teaching. The schools were not ready. The teaching many pupils and students were offered for weeks and months was of doubtful quality. It was difficult to maintain both the level of learning and the motivation among learners - and teachers. This was also the case for the partnership behind this application consisting of four partners. In the implementation of our project, we benefited from the findings in the Master thesis research on the use of digital technologies as a part of collaboration in teams, and how to design didactics and principals for hybrid forms of professional learning communities.