During the recent Covid-19 pandemic, and following the measures imposed by EU countries, on a local level, relating to education, many schools were forced to rapidly transfer their entire educational process, on-line (UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank (October, 2020) - What have we learnt? Overview of findings from a survey of ministries of education on national responses to COVID-19), implementing a distance learning model. The changes occurred over the course of the academic year, imposing a great time pressure for rapid changes and immediate implementation accompanied with technical problems (Educational Institute of Scotland (May, 2020) – Teaching During the COVID-19 Shutdown survey). Even though researches of the past decade have heavily focused on the transition to a digital learning environment, the level of readiness of each organisation to do so in a matter of days was not a priority up to now, especially considering the fact that researches show that it is a popular belief that education is behind the technology curve and that it is time to catch up (Pearson (August 2020) – The Global Learner Survey, August 2020). The wide range of available, open source, cloud tools led to several set of toolkits being used in several implementations of a distance learning approach leading in turn to confusion between the educational community both to teachers and students who found themselves having to use multiple platforms and tools in different contexts. The ETRe Project aims to empower schools to increase their transition readiness to distance/hybrid learning model by targeting teachers, school leaders (decision makers) and policy makers. By providing them with: - a competence framework based on existing ones, and set a minimum level of mastery of critical teachers’ and students’ competences that will ease their rapid adaptation to a transition to a distance/ hybrid learning model, - a report on available, open source, cloud tools (collaboration, storage, communication, planning, etc.) and platforms that support their parallel use presenting the information and pros and cons of the tools in easy-to-read infographics - a guide on how to rapidly and efficiently adapt and digitalise the educational content used in classrooms to a distance learning, supported by technology, approach - a certification process that will set a standard for the required level of readiness an educational organisation should have to sufficiently make a swift towards a distance/hybrid learning model. Its transnational implementation aims to make an impact at an EU level by implicating partners with a geographical disparity. A university, a school, an educational association, a technology and an EU projects experts organisation as partners will provide communication channels with all the project’s target groups and enlarge the overall target audience.
The project aimed to develop a competence framework, based on existing frameworks that would empower educators, education leaders and policy makers to make the decisions and choices that will optimally facilitate a rapid swift to a distance/hybrid learning approach, to explore the available, open source, cloud tools (communication, collaboration, storage, editing, etc.), to support teachers’ decision-making process by providing information on a set of digital tools, and to have an impact on the educational organisations’ readiness towards a digital swift, by developing a certification process which will attempt to set a standard. More specifically, the project, based on its proposal and original structure, had the following objectives: - create a framework of digital competences, - explore the characteristics a digital tools repository should have, - explore the importance and the add-on value of the available open-source tools, - explore available online platforms and their capability to integrate other online tools, - develop a set of easy-to-read infographics to support teachers in choosing the appropriate online tools, - develop a certification for school organizations’ readiness towards a transition to online education.
This project was designed and developed to address the need of revising and mapping what was learned during the COVID pandemic in relation to online school education and to develop what will be needed to support teachers, in the future, to perform a transition, rapidly and effectively, from onsite to online learning. More specifically, during the COVID outbreak, schools around EU were forced to implement an online learning model. This meant that, under time pressure, the proper digital tools had to be chosen, the educational content had to be digitalised, and most importantly the whole learning process had to be transferred on-line. To support a similar transition, the project focused on three main pillars addressed by the three project results. It explored the competence areas and competences that, if acquired by teachers, will help them support a transition to online education, collected and developed a library of openly available online tools to be used by teachers and a guide on how to rapidly digitalise educational content, and designed, developed, and implemented a certification process to evaluate the readiness of a school organization to adopt an online learning model, and support it, if needed, to reach the required level.