ACEEU organized a four-day training event “Train the Trainers” (TTT) for the Project Digital Response on September 19-22, 2022 in Münster. Project partners from School of Business Competences (Bulgaria), Liceul Tehnologic Szekely Karoly (Romania), Instituto Tecnologico De Canarias (Spain), Die Berater Unternehmensberatungs Gesellschaft MBH (Austria), Centre For Advancement Of Research And Development In Educational Technology (Cyprus) came and joined the training as well as presented their outputs of the project.
Since it was the first time for partners to meet offline, ACEEU prepared a warm-up session on the first day. It was a great chance for the 12 participants to introduce themselves properly to get to know each other better. In order to build a creative environment for discussion, ACEEU set five warm-up questions regarding the digitalization of education for the participants. Obviously, all participants engaged in the discussion based on their digital experience during the covid-19 pandemic time from 2019-2020. It intrigued participants’ enthusiasm to deep dive into the topics in the following training sessions.
During the training, Stoyan Drenski, the project coordinator, presented the outcome of IO1. He showed the Digital platform for online-, blended- and distance- learning and teaching based on open source solutions and free accessible web services. The platform is a milestone of the Project since the main objective of Digital Response is to build capacity for online, blended, and distance learning and teaching by using digital technologies. Each partner presented their output of the course content including videos, quizzes, games, etc on the platform.
What does education look like in the future? ACEEU, as one of the trainers in TTT, gave the presentation named “Increasing the Effectiveness of Online and Blended Learning by Boosting the Entrepreneurial Mindset of VET Trainers”. It is a training course exploited by ACEEU. As an accreditation council that aims at the third mission of universities, ACEEU devotes itself to building a bridge between educators and industries to help students build their entrepreneurial mindset. In the presentation, ACEEU not only offered academic methods that benefit VET schools to develop digital courses on the basis of entrepreneurial spirit but also analysed three best practices that had been implemented successfully in three different European countries. ACEEU believes the course contributes to the development of digital pedagogical competencies of teachers based on the EU Framework for Competences in the field of digital technologies.
At the end of the training, ACEEU invited a teacher for Business & Marketing at Hansa Berufskolleg in Muenster (Hansa Technical College), Mr. Christoph de Groot, to share his challenges and the best practices or the application of digital tools during the covid-19 situation. It significantly increases the effectiveness of online and blended learning and benefits the exploitation of the course in terms of digital education. The discussion also contributes a lot to gaining the capacity of using digital technologies.
Overall, TTT in four days was intense but effective, it would be significantly beneficial to the exploitation of the course in terms of digital education. Let’s stay tuned for the further contribution of Digital Response.
