The COVID-19 pandemic has posed serious challenges to schools worldwide. The sudden transition from traditional to virtual classrooms plunged many teachers into uncharted waters, highlighting the insufficient experience with, and knowledge of, digital and remote teaching strategies. Practical and experiential, including Entrepreneurship Education (EE), have been halted despite the significant efforts and advancements of the last decade to include EE in school curricula. The Digital Firefly Project will develop tools and courses that will aid continuity in education by helping teachers to adjust to the new circumstances. The project’s target groups: i) Teachers and trainers in secondary education and VET ii) Teacher educators involved in pre-service or in-service training ii) Entrepreneurship educators involved in schools and VET who have never or only slightly been trained in digital and remote teaching strategies and thus currently face specific difficulties in adapting their EE strategies to a virtual environment and/or to a blended learning environment. The project will identify and address the challenges teachers, trainers and teacher-educators face in developing entrepreneurial competences through the New Normal, i.e. online and/or blended learning environments. The primary objectives of the project are: 1) Investigate how teachers, trainers and teacher’s trainers could effectively maintain, adjust and scale their EE strategies to the demands of the New Normal. 2) Train and support teachers, EE educators and EE teacher’s trainers on how to use digital and remote teaching strategies and tools for delivering effective entrepreneurial learning experiences. 3) Provide practical online tools to ease the way for teachers/EE teachers and EE teacher’s trainers to ensure continuity of EE in online or blended learning environments. 4) Contribute to the wider policy and research discourses on the post-covid future of education in general and EE in specific. The project will produce three primary deliverables: Output 1 - Digital Firefly Research and Policy report Output 2 - Digital Firefly Teacher Kit - teacher resources for online and blended entrepreneurial education Output 3 - Firefly training courses - Open online courses focusing on specific practical topics relating to online and blended entrepreneurial education. The research and policy report will provide the evidence base for and feed into both the development of the teacher kit and the Firefly courses. Furthermore, the resources in the teacher kit will be extensively referenced and used in the Firefly courses to provide course participants with tools that they can take with them from the trainings to implement in their own teaching environments immediately. The courses will promote collaboration and networking among European teachers to grow individual teachers’ personal and professional learning networks, thereby providing them with means and opportunities for continuous learning beyond the actual online courses. The policy and practice impact from this project is expected to be significant due to the innovative nature of this pioneering work that has not been done before for the schools and VET sectors - dissemination will focus heavily on scaling research and outputs to wider audiences at national and international level.
The project was intended to identify and address the challenges teachers, trainers and teacher-educators faced in developing entrepreneurial competences through the New Normal i.e. online and/or blended learning - based on the following project objectives 1) Investigate how teachers, trainers and teacher’s trainers could effectively maintain, adjust and scale their EE strategies to the demands of the New Normal. 2) Train and support teachers, EE educators and EE teacher’s trainers on how to use digital and remote teaching strategies and tools for delivering effective entrepreneurial learning experiences. 3) Provide practical online tools to ease the way for teachers/EE teachers and EE teacher’s trainers to ensure continuity of EE in online or blended learning environments. 4) Contribute to the wider policy and research discourses on the post-covid future of education in general and EE in specific.
The project aimed to address the following needs: The COVID-19 pandemic has posed serious challenges to schools worldwide. The sudden transition from traditional to virtual classrooms plunged many teachers into uncharted waters, highlighting the insufficient experience with, and knowledge of, digital and remote teaching strategies. In this context, teachers first responses were mainly focused on completing planned teaching activities while trying to familiarise themselves with the use of online teaching and communication tools. Courses and programmes based on practical and experiential learning such as Entrepreneurship Education (EE) were halted during the pandemic despite efforts and advancements to integrate EE in school curricula. We argue that schools should find ways to ensure continuity in education by maintaining, scaling and adjusting to the new circumstances, or even rethinking the educational landscape as a continuous plane that stretches across digital and physical environments. In addition to the limited digital teaching experience of teachers, there are additional barriers that emerge from the very nature of EE that we aimed to address.