BlendedVETBlendedVETProgramme: Erasmus+
Key Action 2: Cooperation for Innovation
Field: Strategic partnerships in the field of Vocational Education and Training
Project Duration: 24 months – from 01/09/2020 to 31/08/2022
Countries involved
FRANCE – OsenGo
ITALY – Euroform RFS
GERMANY – Wisamar
NORWAY – Fonix SA
LITHUANIA – EuTrade
The issue
We observe that technology is raising as never and that our trainers need to adapt to this issue to maintain high end standard training courses in our VET centres. For several years on-line trainings are getting a new standard but VET Learners sometimes got lost in pure distance learning, the results are not like expected because often motivation and the necessary user tracking is missing.
Sometimes they simply miss basic digital competences.
We want to train our trainers to blended learning as blended learning offers the advantages of onsite teaching with distance learning and will be better adapted to VET trainings than on-distance training only.
Briefly, blended learning is the fusion of online and face‐to‐face contact between teachers and students. Blended learning environments include not only the physical presence of teachers and students but also the students’ ownership and control of time, place, setting, path, and pace at which their learning takes place (Banditvilai, 2016).
Trainers in VET education often are no teachers but people well experienced in the taught subjects or context. They may feel challenged by adapting their teachings to a new blended learning style.
It’s necessary to care for clear concepts in blended learning, develop an appropriate training method, to supply the trainers with proven end evaluated material and strategies to create and perform blended learning courses.
That is what we want to achieve during our BlendedVET project.
Our Proposed Project
BlendedVET, aims at creating an online, flexible training for VET trainers who are willing to combine face to face and online instruction modalities. Blended learning has become a widespread teaching modality, especially in K-12 and higher education. The project will be an answer towards helping VET teachers to transform existing trainings into blended learning or create blended learning trainings. More specifically, we aim to provide VET trainers with examples of existing blended learnings to inspire them, to give them methodology and guidance for developing their own blended learning based on their trainings they deliver. For this purpose, we will create a learning package in blended learning (so trainers can directly experience the methodology while creating their own content) and a training model which will allow to implement the teacher training in all VET centres and on any topics.
Our outcomes will not be topic related but blended learning methodology related.
Based on the above, our main goals are:
• Promoting lifelong learning of VET teachers
• Supporting the innovative approaches and digital technologies for teaching and training
Main Activities
A1: Collection and research of blended learning best practices and methods:
The research and definition of learning methods and methodologies combined with the best practices research will lead to a guide about blended learning to provide teachers who are willing to use blended learning in their practice some theoretical and practical guidance.
A2: Learning package for blended learning curricular creation:
This output will lead to the creation of a learning package for blended learning curricular creation. To create this model the partnership will establish the learning objectives, curricular activities (in a blended learning form), gather and/or create teaching materials to conduct the activities and determine assessment methods.
A3: Blended learning training program model:
The partnership will elaborate and test a Blended learning Training program model. Obviously, convinced by the idea that we learn better by experience, we will design the training model in the form of a blended learning training. 90% of the course will be online and 10% face to face. The developed model course will have a duration of 3 months in total and represent 100 hours.
A4: Learning Platform:
It will lead to the creation of an online platform which will include the examples from output 1 and the blended learning package from output 2, the blended learning training program modeland the experiences form the pilot training output 3.
Results