VOOCS for VET teacher professionalization: Lessons learned from the EU Erasmus+ Pro-VET project

Experiences

For this MESH guide, project partners were asked questions via an online survey (see methods in 'design practices'). To begin locally, from within the local Russian and Serbian development teams, the overall development process was experienced as an interesting but rather ‘bumpy road’. Partners mention that while the overall teamwork was well-coordinated, it nevertheless took a lot of time and effort to make the course development process run smoothly due to various external and internal factors. Examples are the lack of an e-platform to build the VOOC on, cultural differences in approaches to online learning as well as varying levels of ICT literacy and ICT competence of the participants. This is an interesting observation as one of the main objects of Pro-VET was local capacity building with regard to developing ODL tools.

Generally, highly valued were the ‘EU good practices’ from the start, as an inspiration, the general supervision or ‘mentoring’ by experienced EU-partners but first and foremost the co-creation happening from within the Pro-VET project community. Regular transnational meetings and later more online contacts, consults, due to COVID-19 were clearly highly valued by all project partners and fostered capacity building and learning. One of the team members puts it as followed:

“The collective process in Pro-VET has had a profoundly positive impact on our group as we have experienced in practice how the commitment of people from different cultures, countries and institutions to a joint program to achieve specific common goals and objectives can take a structured form of effective collaboration. Our regular participation in different collective events and meetings, timely support of the project coordinators and their recommendations on demand, constant contacts with other partners of the project helped us a lot in developing our course.”

And:

“For me, this is the first participation in an international project of this kind and the first time to develop a course program with several colleagues with whom I will implement it together. The joint process we built with our colleagues from the EU, as well as the cooperative activities in my team, were very stimulating for me, for my interest in working on the project and the effort to prepare teaching materials with a target group that is very demanding in terms of prior knowledge, experiences and expectations related to the topic of the course.”

Also, the project and the development of VOOC’s simultaneously was experienced as challenging due to COVID-19. In the words of one of the partners:

“The motivation to work on the development of MOOCs weakened, considering online teaching and many other additional activities and changed life and teaching circumstances during the pandemic. This was present in our team, but the bigger problem was that potential participants in alpha and beta testing also faced this, which made these phases in the development of MOOC more difficult.”

Communication was regularly, face-to-face or virtually, this supported the development teams in developing the required skills for effective teamwork. Sharing ideas, points of view, information, and expertise helped to keep everyone informed and in the loop. Communication was also about giving and receiving feedback, brainstorming ideas, and listening to one another. In a way, Pro-VET not only helped in developing ODL tools, but it also meant getting experienced with a new international and more co-creative way of working.