During the lockdown, near-universal school closures affecting 192 countries and impacting more than 60% of the world’s student population heightened concerns about the vulnerability of many countries to significant long-term learning losses. Reducing the negative impact of this situation is an urgency for the whole HE sector. All the lecturers have faced issues related to the impossibility of physical coexistence with the students and among these issues they have faced those that affected negatively the lessons’ effectiveness as well as the learners’ motivation. The general objective of the project is to enhance HEI educators skills for enabling them to develop digital training contents promoting equal opportunities for learners attending courses in the virtual/extended class. The detailed objectives include: - improve/innovate online teaching so to fulfil the needs of HE when delivering training in the V/E class and remote class - promote blending pedagogical, technical and technological aspects in the redesign of the training course - increase the lecturers’ skills in the three aspects highlighted above, considered individually and in their mutual interactions To win this challenge and close the gap between in-presence lessons and virtual lessons the educators should be supported in developing their skills and innovating in three dimensions: pedagogical, technical and technological. The partnership is composed of 4 Universities (Poznan University of Technology (PL) - Distant learning support unit and Faculty of Industrial and Management; LUMSA, Rome (IT) - Department of Pedagogy; University Ramon Llull - Barcelona (SP) - Department of Engineering; University of Maribor (SL) - Knowledge Transfer Office and Department of logistics) and one company, ValueDo, Florence (IT), operating in the field of online and digital training. Valuedo will contribute in a transversal way to the project outputs and will boost the innovativeness of the results. To achieve the goal the workflow includes 4 major phases producing 4 intellectual outputs. IO1's workflow aims at producing a gap analysis that will provide the inputs for the definition of the validated list of digital tools to be further analysed in the other IOs. To reach this output the partner will conduct a desk research, in-deep interviews and collect questionnaires from both lecturers and students that will be analysed in IO2 and IO3. IO2 “The virtual/extended class (V/E) Teaching & Learning Tasks Dynamic Toolkit” is designed to support teachers in the acquisition of pedagogical and digital skills. It will be organized as an open online tool with searchable and downloadable items, analysing the pedagogical features of the digital tools selected in IO1 and providing suggestions for their adoption. In parallel with the development of IO2, the partners will create, test and release IO3 “Adaptive interactive platform supporting HE educators in solving technical problems”. This output is designed to diagnose teaching capabilities maturity and support the lecturers with tips and methods to be retrieved in just one place (the online platform). Finally, URL will lead the activities for developing IO4 “Software and dashboard for monitoring the technological aspects of the virtual training” that will allow the partners to measure several indicators (audio and voice quality, face landmarks, etc.) from all the attendants to assess their engagement and suggest the lecturers corrective measures. All the contents of the last three outputs aimed at providing an holistic support to the academic staff will be piloted jointly by the Universities: they will develop 16 new lessons, involving at least 8 lecturers and reaching at least 480 students (30 students in each class) to ensure the effectiveness and efficacy of the tools. To monitor the impact the partners will conduct both semi-structured interviews and quali-quantitative questionnaires. Thanks to the IOs, the project will deliver ready-to-use solutions for: - improving the skills of educators in various pedagogical methodologies, suggesting them practical online and free tool that could be used for delivering innovative training contents - identifying easy solutions to the most frequent technical problems - ensuring technological quality of the online lessons identifying in an automatic way when the attention of students in the online environment is decreasing It will result in short term impacts including the raising of skills of the lecturers regarding the pedagogical, technical and technological tools necessary for the effective conduct of lessons with virtual/extended class (V/E) classes and an increase in student participation and involvement. In the long-term the project aims to ensure greater inclusiveness that will allow every learners (in class or online) equal opportunities for participation in the training, also through appropriate customization of the educational path in respect of individual difference.
The consortium aimed to create “Holistics Online Teaching SUPport” (HOTSUP) for teachers, as they had to deal with the challenge of switching to online lessons. Specifically, the consortium wanted to achieve the following results: - Solve the problems emerging from online/hybrid education identified by the research among teachers and students - Improve the quality of online/hybrid teaching by increasing the technical/technological and pedagogical skills of HEI educators - Provide sustainability of education - the project was launched during a global pandemic and the need for online teaching was obvious. However, it is believed that hybrid/remote teaching will not disappear in the future, responding to other needs or crises, both large-scale, such as pandemics, and personal scale, such as health conditions or material status (commuting and accommodation costs may be the barrier to continuing education) - Increase digital skills of teachers and students and digitization of education at various levels - Support students’ well-being - the consortium has always believed that skilled teachers educate and inspire students and let them grow scientifically and personally in a friendly, safe and high-quality environment.
The application was inspired by the research conducted after HEIs across the EU were forced to move to online teaching, because of the restrictions implemented in response to the Covid19 pandemic. Our research showed that the digital tools used by educators provided an opportunity for the systematic sharing of content related to a given subject (74.7%) and systematic discussion with students of the issues they were presented with (63.9%). The added value of this methodology, which appeared in the opinions of lecturers, was the possibility of providing additional materials to what would normally be provided, thus deepening students’ knowledge (47.5%) and access to materials recorded during synchronous classes (29.7%). In light of the above, the HotSup project set to address the following needs: 1. Ensuring a high-quality and inclusive training to all students the educators should master innovative methodologies encompassing pedagogical, technical and technological aspects (Need1), 2. Improving digital skills of the lecturers (Need2) 3. Stimulating the active role of the students (Need3) 4. Exploring the concept of the virtual classroom (Need4) 5. Recognizing the involvement of students (Need 5) All the needs were addressed during HOTSUP project implementation.