Today is the last day of the UnderstandIT project. So what have we achieved?
The main objective of the project was to find out whether it was possible to transfer the very intensive concurrent design approach to the online medium. ConCurrent Design involves gathering all relevant players, in this case for e-learning development, in one room for 1/2 day or a full day, four or five times over a period of a few months until all aspects of the proposed e-learning course are finalized. If you are not in the room you are not needed. This process, borrowed from the space industry, has proved to work well for the development of e-learning courses. The VITAE course offers to teachers of vocational education the chance to improve their ICT integration skills whilst also coaching their colleagues to do so.
So
the challenge for the UnderstandIT project was whether this process of elearning course development could be transferred online. The UnderstandIT project used the previously developed VITAE vocational training course to test out distributed CCeD with partners from Denmark, Norway Lithuania Italy, Germany and Portugal.
In order to test the online version of CCeD, the project partners decided to amend the VITAE course so that it used a coaching approach rather than the previous mentoring approach. Could we develop the course to the stage of producing a viable business plan for offering it across Europe?
So here are the list of the results which we got.
1. Guidelines for using the CCeD approach in an online environment. ie Distributed ConCurrent e-Design
2. An amended VITAE course
3. An online tool for making a tailored business plan for offering the VITAE course using the Business Model Generator approach
4. A proof of concept offering the VITAE course through the ELGG platform multi-lingually. We were able to have a discussion in several different languages using Google translate.
5. Language and cultural guidelines for offering a course across cultural boundaries.
6. The amended VITAE course offered through
- WiZiQ in English
- the new global learning portal NooA in Danish and English
- HiST, Trondheim in Norwegian
7. An introductory course to distributed CCeD through WIZiQ
8. A short online introductory course to coaching
The discipline of the CCeD process helped us to sail through the project in a very structured manner with the help of Adobe Connect and Google Docs. It has been a pleasure working with my European colleagues who have been creative and generous of their time and above all reliable and dependable. As the partner responsible for quality assurance in this project, this has made my job much easier!