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

Impact

In the following we will summarize the impact of Pro-VET, as asked in the online survey sent to all project partners for this MESH guide. For partners personally, Pro-VET clearly meant a lot with regard to roughly: 1) developing VOOC’s as such, 2) getting to know new (more interactive) pedagogical approaches, 3) improving teamwork, 4) new national cooperation and international experience.

According to project partners:

“The impact of MOOC development on me personally lies in the opportunity to try new equipment, in exchange of experience with colleagues from different countries. The impact of MOOC development for our Pro-VET development team lies in new pedagogical approaches in the development of online courses.”

“- this [Pro-VET] opened up broader prospects for my further professional growth and development as a VET teacher and helped me start using new digital tools/methods (e.g., H5P; digital storytelling, etc.);
- it was an opportunity to improve our teamwork and expand our knowledge in MOOC design, development and delivery in close collaboration with our Russian and European partners;
- it was a brilliant experience to become an integral part of international cooperation of various institutions working towards the common goals of promoting and disseminating the best e-learning ideas and practices.”

Interestingly, aside from being experienced as a challenge in the project, COVID-19 strangely enough also created a lot of momentum for the project and work done by partners in Pro-VET:

“When Covid-19 broke out, higher education institutions faced the challenge of adapting to the digital mode of teaching and learning. Teachers and students recognized the lack of digital literacy, equipment, methods and tools to conduct online classes. Then the pandemic situation has been changing continuously: digital and traditional face-to-face classes have been interchanging, sometimes part of the class is delivered online, while another part of the lesson is conducted in face-to-face mode. Teachers and students felt vulnerable and unprepared for the uncertainty of educational scenarios. Moreover, current circumstances require a winning combination of traditional face-to-face and digital modes. Hybrid teaching and learning combines face-to-face and online teaching and learning into one cohesive experience, where synchronous educational interactions occur in both modes. However, it is difficult to organize hybrid teaching and learning because universities lack proper facilities, methodologies, tools and staff capacities. That is why PRO-VET project is implemented just on time .”

And:

“For me personally, working with MOOCs was my first experience with the preparation and implementation of this type of teaching. As a professor at the faculty for more than 15 years, I taught directly, in direct contact with students. For the first time, I prepared online lessons for experts from non-pedagogical professions. For me, it was a professional challenge and an opportunity to learn, primarily about the technical possibilities of the online learning platform for a large number of students. As a team, we had the opportunity to get to know each other better as professionals working at different faculties and with different research interests. Work on the development of the MOOC has influenced the improvement of competencies related to teamwork in the development and implementation of the curriculum. It is important for the institution to have developed programs, such as ours, intended for pedagogical training of teachers of vocational subjects at the level of higher education. Such programs can be an opportunity for [institution] to have a significant impact on improving the pedagogical competencies of teachers at all levels of education, not only at the university level, which has not been adequately implemented so far.”