The Roadmap for Educators in Digital Soft Skills -TRENDSS Project was brought to life as a prompt response to the digital shift in educational paradigms generated by the pandemic. The Scientific Foresight Unit (STOA) of the European Parliamentary Research Service has just carried out studies recently that analyze current and future threats related to a digital society, alongside currently adopted socio-technical and legal approaches. The studies show the preoccupation of the EU Parlament about the issue and the need to develop an innovative approach to the online education problem. Digital society is a new problem and the solutions will be innovations in training, learning and educational materials. The Transnational Consortium of the TRENDSS project consists of 6 partner organizations from Hungary, Poland, Greece, Croatia, Romania and Georgia, and they are all experienced actors in adult education (trainers, coaches, mentors, teacher trainers, professors, youth workers training young adults and support staff). The members of the consortium has already established practices of working both face-to-face and online to share knowledge, good practices, experiment, receive feedback and support each other as a community. The novelty of the TRENDSS project lies in its integrated approach of recognizing the need for different pedagogical approaches in the digital era and by instantly responding to the current issues in the educational paradigm shift by focusing on an area of its members' expertise: the soft skills development. By leveraging on the opportunities of the situation our project offers complex solutions for all the detected problems we recognized currently: The TRENDSS project could be described along with the following questions: -Why is TRENDSS needed? Due to the pandemic context, as explained in detail above, the only education form is digital education nowadays. It means the world of education will never be the same as it was before. The new situation requires new approaches and new solutions One of our outputs is a longitudinal study on the changes in education. We are going to research the trends and recommend strategic steps for educators to prepare. - What is needed? We believe a new approach is needed. It is not enough to be digitally literate but we also need to develop and use soft skills in education in a different way than before. Therefore, we will provide Comparative Methodological Guidelines to define and describe important soft skill competencies for digital instruction. These are transferable skills from face-to-face classrooms to digital classrooms. By elaborating on the framework we can set goals to be achieved by a competent digital trainer. In addition, our Ethical guidelines will also provide a new norm and define what is ethical and what is not in the digital context. - How can we get there? To reach the level of a competent and ethical trainer we need practice. TRENDSS is creating two practical e-learning modules: Demo videos of good practices and the Survival kit for Trainers in the Digital World. Both intellectual outputs aim at providing hands-on, easy, engaging ideas and good practices. However, to put everything in perspective, we also need to organize all these elements into a framework: The Roadmap for Educators in Digital Soft Skills is a complex e-solution platform with a lot of structured, engaging and gamified interactive exercises that could effectively help the trainers to walk the upskilling path in soft skill development. - Who is coming with us? As a consortium based on past common experience (as we are all trainers who participated in a trainer event ) we also believe that communities are important - especially today in the times of social distancing, when digital communication may be the only way to interact - and we would like to fill the gap for trainers and design the concept of Collaboration and Networking for educators of adult learners. We will elaborate on a theoretical framework and will invite international trainers and educators for big-scale international Multiplier events to be part of a collaborating community and network.
TRENDSS RECOGNIZED AND ADDRESSED THE FOLLOWING CHALLENGES that put educators in a very vulnerable position: - They had to digitalize courses, and acquire digital skills suddenly which often resulted in creating lower-quality educational programs, - Under the pressure of instantaneous changes, the importance of applying pedagogic soft skills appropriate for digital platforms was usually overshadowed by grueling technical challenges and educators often were not aware of the new competencies. - Unfortunately, inequalities in being digitally equipped or literate caused difficulties for both educators and learners. BASED ON THE ABOVE, OUR OBJECTIVES were: - to support educators by helping develop resilience to cope with the new expectations of the rapid shift to digital instruction - to raise awareness of soft skills in the digital space - solutions and methodological tools to create inclusive and engaging digital classrooms, - to provide information on potential communication styles tailored to virtual platforms, - to create new methodological guidelines and practical tools - to make online education a strategic priority for educators and to establish and elaborate on some potential quality assurance and further training areas.
The TRENDSS Project was brought to life as a prompt response to the digital shift in educational paradigms generated by the pandemic in order to support educators in their digital transformation challenges, such as: -the psychological burden to become digital in an instant - the need for support and community -navigate through the overwhelming list of new and constantly changing digital tools - the need for comparisons of old and new approaches, see variables and constants, options, critical thinking -find resources and learn about new pedagogical approaches, soft skills needed for the digital classroom - need for methodological tools and soft skills development. The TRENDSS project also addressed the needs of digital learners and developed methodological tools that could create more engaging online lessons and support communication and the processes of motivating, testing, assessing, discussing, reflecting etc. The project team consists of experienced actors in adult education (trainers, teachers, coaches, teacher trainers, professors, youth workers and support staff) who experienced the digital challenges firsthand. Therefore, their needs for learning, finding solutions and collaborating transnationally were addressed too.