The current COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the need for modernisation and digital transformation of education and training across Europe. While many institutions are well resourced and have considerable knowledge and experience in providing effective remote/online teaching and learning to students, others are not so fortunate. During this global crisis educators have found themselves having to adapt and learn very quickly in ‘real time’ how to plan and deliver an engaging and inclusive curriculum ‘remotely’, while simultaneously helping their students adapt to the huge change in how they acquire new knowledge and skills. The goal of this 18-month project is to advance and reinforce the ability of teachers in vocational education and training institutions to develop and deliver effective, high quality, inclusive digital education within the creative sector and beyond. The focus of the project is on building teacher’s capacity to develop and implement engaging, effective and transferable online, blended/distance teaching and learning strategies. The project will support teachers to acquire and develop these skills/knowledges through the delivery of practical digital skills workshops using accessible online teaching tools, and also through the sharing of new ideas, digital resources, individual expertise and good practice. It is planned that during training events/exchange of good practice meetings, guest keynote speakers will be invited to deliver masterclasses and share innovative practices, which will be delivered both face to face and ‘virtually’. In addition, the project will also seek to develop digital pedagogical competences of participating teachers so that they can coach other teachers in their own institutions over the duration of the project and beyond. It is the projects aim that participating teachers will become ‘digital champions’ for their respective institutions and that their learning will benefit as many teachers as possible by enabling them to provide high quality inclusive online remote/blended teaching and learning to their students. The project involves 7 partner schools GLR (Netherlands). ARTEVELDEHOGESCHOOL (Belgium) ENAC (Italy), ETIC (Portugal), GRADIA (Finland), IES (Spain), NCG (UK), and 1 associate partner school, GBS St.Galen (Switzerland). These schools have worked successfully together on previous projects and in doing so have developed effective collaborative working practices and have a proven track record of developing highly creative/innovative solutions to 21st Century challenges. The project will provide professional development for up to 35 teachers from a variety of vocational areas. The majority of the teachers currently teach within the creative industries i.e. Audio/Visual, Photography, Graphic Communication, Interactive Media etc. The project's objectives are: To develop accessible digital approaches to deliver effective methods of assessment. The development of ICT competences of teachers to support both synchronous and asynchronous teaching. The development of teachers coaching strategies to enable them to support other colleagues in their ‘home’ institutions. Also, as with all our previous Erasmus projects we want to further consolidate our network of European partner schools and establish new connections between teachers from different vocational areas. Regarding tangibles, while there is no ‘intellectual output’ in this project we want to create a digital repository which will contain all results of our project in all main key areas for improvement, namely learning scenarios, theoretical background of each key area (descriptions of apps, innovative methods and approaches), video interviews of teachers' stories of learning scenarios implementation, screen recordings, student feedback, useful links etc. While some participating teachers are very experienced in Erasmus projects, some are newcomers to the project. They will all take part in structured training sessions relevant for the above specified key areas of improvement. With this project we want to enhance teachers' competences in the field of online/virtual teaching methods, assessment methods, their ICT skills, their intercultural and language competences. We expect, a real meeting will be possible in November 2021. If not, the LTT meetings will be transformed into online meetings.
Project Partners aimed at researching the best practices in the online and digital education in the field of Creative Industries. After a first part dedicated to the research with the involvement of some experts working in 8 European VET centres, the aim was to share and exchange the best practices through the organization of two Training activities that were meant to involve around 80 teachers. This Objective was reached but, due to COVID, only partially because one of the training sessions was cancelled and transformed into an online training, that was effective, but not so much as the one in-person. Another aim of the project was to train these teachers/trainers and make them act as ambassadors at their own home institutions, in order to spread the results beyond the participants.
The project stemmed from the idea of facing the impact that Covid19 had on schools and the new way of teaching/learning teachers and students had to adapt to. The partnership was an existing one used to work together for years but suddenly had to stop because of COVID spreading all around Europe/world.The idea was to bring together teachers from the 8 partners to share best practices learnt in the first months of the pandemic to overcome the difficulties faced at school, especially those related to the online teaching. The focus was on those practical subjects related to creative industries that require a “physical” teaching/learning. Teachers had to quickly learn how to use online tools in order to follow school programmes and to guarantee classes, but most of them had no experience. This brought to the development of specific skills for digital and online education and teachers from media/design fields started finding their own solutions as well. The project aimed to bring them together in order to share these solutions and to adapt them to the after-pandemic context: which were the lessons learnt, what to keep, what to change in the “traditional” teaching, how to combine online and offline education etc.