The Erasmus+ project „Flexible Tailored Learning Pathway for Everyone“ (FlexLearn) is the partnership of 4 European VET institutions, whose objective is to contribute by sharing the best practices in the educational field, to improve the skills of the teachers, trainers and the key persons in Inclusive and Tailored Learning process. As a result of this cooperation, they create a web-based Competence Collection of educational approaches and methods and increase the capacity of operating at a transnational level. Period: 24 months Participants: European VET institutions; the Key persons of arranging the teaching/training process, Educators. Aim: To improve the flexibility, accessibility and inclusion in education through tailored pathways, to promote the quality of VET through increasing the skills of the people who are responsible for putting it into practice – educators, education specialists, key-persons in Educational leadership. Necessity: The Project is called into life by Haapsalu Vocational Education and Training Centre. Due to the statistics, about 22% of the students drop out of VET schools in Estonia every year. There are a lot of students whom it is difficult to access and maintain in studies in mainstream ways, especially the risk groups (SEN-students, low-skilled adults and students, who are living in the countryside and are difficult to reach). To find out the ways to make learning more flexible and reachable for these groups, the project concentrates on topics, which are relevant in all of the participating countries. Due to the pre-project communication between the partners, we have found out the strengths of each country, which has been the general base for working out the topics for LTTA meetings. Together created web-based Competence Collection Box will be a necessary working tool for Educators’ in Inclusive and Tailored Learning process. International experiences that the participants gain from the meetings would extend and develop their educators' competences and improve the quality and accessibility of Education in every participating country. Main activities: 3 Transnational project meetings, 2 specialists from every country to monitor and evaluate the progress of the project, share feedback and work with the Competence Collection 4 Training Activities, 4 participants (Teachers, Education specialists and leaders) from each partner organization. Every partner organizes one LTTA meeting which includes the teaching program for 5 days. Every Training Activity is focused on a certain topic due to the strengths and experiences of the partner organization: Finland - Tailored Learning Pathways for different students. Ireland - RPL - Recognition of Prior Learning and work experiences according to curricula and learning outcomes Netherlands - Learning Methods focused on developing student`s self-management, study and activity skills (project training, simulation, group work) Estonia - Digital approaches and Flexible Long-distance Learning Solutions (e-learning, development of digital competences, digital environments, and digital security). During every activity: The host partner introduces the Educational system and the learning process at their organization and generally in their country. The host institution gives an overview of the focus topic and the approaches implemented in their school and country. Each partner presents the activities and approaches of their school according to the topic. Additional activities according to the choice of the hosting partner, to expand the background of the topic - involving experts, visits to local organizations, practical workshops/teamwork activities to share the best practices in use. As a result of the activities, the best approaches according to the topic are worked out and added to the web-based Competence Collection. Participating teams will evaluate the gained knowledge of LTTA and make conclusions. After the training activity, every participating institution organizes an evaluation activity with the staff (round table forum, discussion, presentation etc) to find out how to implement it. The Coordinator of every participating organisation is responsible for completing the electronic feedback. The main impact of this project will occur in the rise of the quality of teaching and educational management in every participating country. As a result, the participating organizations and the participants have more knowledge and skills in the Inclusive and Tailored Learning process and implementation of necessary approaches, they are experts in every relevant topic the project activities covered. As an additional value, they have created a widely available web-based Competence Collection, which is a freeware tool and will be shared with other VET institutions.
We wanted to improve the awareness and knowledge of the development possibilities of target group education among the project countries’ training specialists and educators. We wanted to investigate the options for reducing dropout of risk group students in order to implement flexible solutions in the study process. We wanted to create a webpage using the free software (Weebly) with the results of our project. We wanted to create The Competence Collection Box as a necessary working tool for Educators’ in Inclusive and Tailored Learning process to help the colleagues who are facing the same problems when dealing with the same topics. We wanted to find out the ways to make learning more flexible and reachable for SEN-students, low-skilled adults and students, who are living in the countryside and are difficult to reach. We wanted to build up an international community of the people who face the same situations and problems during their work and who are interested to find flexible solutions. We wanted to share our experiences with the teachers from other European VET schools.
The Project was called into life by Haapsalu Vocational Education and Training Centre because of the need to improve the flexibility, accessibility and inclusion in education through tailored pathways and promote the quality of VET through increasing the skills of the educators, education specialists and key-persons in Educational leadership. Due to the statistics before 2020 when the project started, about 22% of the students dropped out of VET schools in Estonia every year. There are a lot of students whom it was difficult to access and maintain in studies in mainstream ways, especially the risk groups (SEN-students, low-skilled adults and students, who are living in the countryside and are difficult to reach). To find out the ways to make learning more flexible and reachable for these groups, the project concentrated on topics, which are relevant in all of the participating countries. Due to the pre-project communication between the partners, we found out the strengths of each country, which became the topic to work on LTTA meetings. The main impact of this project was planned to occur in the rise of the quality of teaching and educational management in every participating country.