It is well known by now that the COVID-19 crisis has brought a new reality to education provision and especially VET education. Many education providers, including VET, quickly, almost forcely, turned to elearning to ensure the continuity of education for their learners. But what about quality in elearning? It is evident that in such a short time, applying quality in elearning for VET education was hard to encompass. Transforming education and facilitating its transition to the digital era, has been a priority in the EU for the past years, even before COVID-19. The Digital education Action Plan (2018) identified 3 priorities and set out measures to help member states and education institutions address the challenges of digital transformation and provision of distance learning. In October 2020, the new Digital Education action plan was announced, which acts as a call to action for stronger cooperation at EU level to learn from the COVID-19 crisis and make education and training systems for the digital age. The BEQUEL project aims at assisting VET providers in their progress towards effective deployment of elearning VET programmes and ensuring quality assurance practices, based on the Digital Education Action Plan, the DigiCompOrg framework, the ENQA considerations and other quality assurance in digital education initiatives. The project will include actions that contribute to building elearning education readiness and to mitigating the impact of the crisis on VET education. The general objective of the project is to develop quality assurance in elearning provision and practices of VET educators, in the involved countries, through promotion of self-evaluation, quality benchmarking and networking between VET providers. The specific objectives of the project are: 1. To examine the existing approaches for quality in digital elearning and pedagogies in VET education at European level. 2. To develop a quality assurance framework and self-assessment questionnaires for quality assurance in elearning provision for VET organisations. 3. To develop a thematic portal on quality assurance in digital transformation with various content, documents, links, articles, videos. 4. To develop an on-line benchmarking tool for quality assurance in elearning for VET providers. 5. To create a Community of Practice of VET providers across the EU and mobilize it through social media. The project targets primarily VET providers involved in European Countries who have undergone procedures for the up taking of elearning programmes and the digitalisation of their education provision. At second level, the project targets stakeholders, policy makers, researchers and practitioners. BEQUEL will be implemented by 6 partners, coming from 5 European countries: Slovakia, Greece, Italy, Spain and Belgium. The synthesis of the partners and their networks, will ensure the sustainability and impact of the project, since it involves pan European associations and their members. All partners have experience in EU projects, which is a strong basis for the development of the current project. BEQUEL project will have 2 main Intellectual outputs: - IO1 Benchmarking methodology and tools, where partners will develop a quality assurance framework for elearning practices for VET schools and organisations and a benchmarking methodology and self-assessment questionnaire for VET providers. - IO2 Online benchmarking tools, where the online tools will be launched on an online platform and partners will collect and analyse data, while VET providers will participate in a community of practice concentrated on e-learning practices and quality in e-learning. Furthermore, videos will be created by partners, for the promotion of virtual and online learning in VET after the COVID-19 crisis. An important promotional result will be the creation of a quality badge for VET providers, which will enhance the engagement of the target group and the sustainability of the project. The badge will be awarded to VET providers that display good practices in elearning practices. Other results of the project include: 5 multiplier events, project management plan, dissemination & exploitation strategy, promotional materials and activities. The project is expected to have a great impact on the participants, participating organisations, target groups, stakeholders, as well as in local/ regional/ national and European level. The project is expected to facilitate the adoption of the new Digital skills agenda at European level. In particular, the project will contribute to the development of a high-performing digital education ecosystem, the first priority of the new action plan, by helping with the creation of high quality learning content, user friendly tools and secure platforms for VET education.
The project aims to contribute to building digital education readiness and to mitigating the impact of the COVID-19 crisis. By implementing the BEQUEL project, the project partners wanted to achieve the following objectives: 1. To examine the existing approaches for quality in digital e-learning and pedagogies in VET at the European level. 2. To develop a quality assurance framework and self-assessment questionnaires for quality assurance in e-learning provision for VET organizations. 3. To develop a thematic portal on quality assurance in digital transformation with various content, documents, links, articles, and videos. 4. To develop an online benchmarking tool for quality assurance in e-learning for VET providers. 5. To create and mobilize a Community of Practice of VET providers across the EU through social media.
The project answered the urgent needs coming with COVID-19 - to assure high-quality online education. The pandemic caused the largest disruption to education systems in history, affecting nearly 1.6 billion students in more than 190 countries. The need to modernize and digitally transform education has become increasingly urgent at that time. In Slovakia, Greece, Italy and Spain very few schools were prepared for online education and there were no generally accepted criteria or requirements for e-learning. Some VET institutions developed their own criteria to ensure the quality of e-learning, but most VET organizations did not have guidelines. VET schools have started developing e-learning opportunities, but still without following a quality framework or national guidelines. The need to respond promptly to learners due to the disruption of classes has led to the recognition and use of distance learning as largely homologous. Many schools had already made great efforts to digitize before the Covid19, but the pandemic turned a significant part of teaching towards e-learning. Therefore, to ensure a high-quality transition to e-learning, quality monitoring, and the related benchmarking project have become very relevant and necessary.