Distance Education in Transnational School Projects and in In-service Training.
| Kirsten M. Anttila, M. Ed. Senior Consultant e-mail: kma@dlh.dk |
Mogens Eriksen Senior Consultant e-mail: me@dlh.dk |
The Research Centre for Education and ICT
The Royal Danish School of Educational Studies (RDSES)
Emdrupvej 101
2400 Copenhagen NV, Denmark
http://www.copenhagen.dlh.dk/espdk
Abstract
Which official initiatives and which efforts are made regarding the implementation of ICT in the Danish school system? Taking the starting-point in different pedagogical scenarios we’ll describe an approach to implementing ICT – in transnational teleprojects carried out in Denmark since 1987 within the framework of European Schools Project as well as in in-service training. Which educational materials have been produced to meet the need for and the demands from teachers in both areas? How do we at RDSES meet the challenges in the use of ICT in in-service training, whether that be ordinary or distance learning courses? How do we collaborate between the European countries? Which initiatives and which possibilities lie in the EU Socrates programmes
as far as promoting the use of ICT and specifically telecommunication in education?
3. Key Words
Danish Action Plan for ICT 1998 – 2003
ICT – Driving Licence
Development projects
European Schools Project
In-service training
Project Method
Educational materials
Socrates
4.
European Schools Project (ESP) http://www.esp.educ.uva.nl/
The first Danish teleprojects, under the name ’Schools in Network’ were launched at RDSES in 1987. In 1989 the project began to co-operate with ESP, initiated in 1988 by the University of Amsterdam, NL. European Schools Project is a network organisation which supports a community of schools worldwide to explore applications of educational telematics. The ESP aims at improvement and innovation of educational activities and its organisation. It offers educational, organisational and technical support and provides opportunities for:
| electronic communication between individuals, schools and educational networks, |
| the design, performance and evaluation of teleprojects, |
| the creation and usage of information resources, |
| to enhance better learning and teaching. |
The activities in ESP now include + 26 countries in Europe and beyond. Annual teachers’ conferences take place in the participating countries - in 1998 in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1999 in Tartu, Estonia , and in 2000 in Haugesund, Norway. Although the members of ESP are connected by telematics throughout the year, the participating teachers at the conferences find these to be an important forum for discussing pedagogical and didactical issues. The personal face-to-face contacts have also proved to be an important extra and very valuable element for designing successful curriculum collaboration.
Teleprojects
Teleprojects are co-operative distance learning projects in which telematics and foreign languages are communication tools. Teachers mutually determine a central topic of the curriculum around which students execute local (research) activities. Results are discussed and exchanged by means of electronic mail.
What challenges and barriers do teachers meet, when they run teleprojects?
Teachers have very enthusiastically engaged themselves in teleprojects. In most cases because they found the possibility of letting their students collaborate with foreign peers relevant and of importance. But over the years we have noticed that such collaboration is a real challenge to the teacher’s professionalism in areas such as: knowledge of ICT genres, project method etc., and it has thus revealed a great need for in-service training. Furthermore ICT action plans both on national and European levels have proved essential in order to justify the implementation of teleprojects in the classroom.
Teachers’ competences in ICT-genre didactics.
Quite a few teachers experienced, that they – although they had a traditional curriculum related didactical competence – needed the didactical competences related to each of the current ICT genres such as wordprocessors, spreadsheets, e-mail, electronic conferences etc. It’s of vital importance that a teacher before engaging in a teleproject masters all these competences. Bent B. Andresen, director at the ’Research Centre for Education and ICT’ at RDSES, has in the following model illustrated how the ICT-genre didactics and the subject related didactics complement each other.
Subject related didactics … … … …
MANJKA SLIKA
As Bent B. Andresen emphasizes, ’teachers that acquire these ICT competences have access to new pedagogical methods, whereas teachers who don’t have these competences lack this freedom in their educational practice’.
Importance of clearly formulated common objectives
Another obstacle that some teachers have met is the fact, that they have failed to clearly describe the common objectives for their collaboration. They experienced, when the teleproject was ’in the air’, that the common objectives after all had been interpreted differently by the two partners.
In some cases the emphasis was put more on the technological issue for one partner – the main objective was to introduce the students to some of the ICT-genres susch as the wordprocessor and e-mail – whereas the curriculum related content of the collaboration was of major importance for her counterpart. This of course invariably had an impact on the result of the collaboration and thereby an effect on the learning processes. In some cases the teachers didn’t manage to clarify their different objectives and had to stop the collaboration.
In case the teachers had been able to use the project method in their work they might have overcome this problem from the very beginning.
ICT action plans in the educational system
As pointed out earlier it is of vital importance that ICT action plans exist at both local, national and European level when talking about implementation of ICT in transnational teleprojects.
In 1998 the Danish Ministry of Education published the combined strategies and action plan for ICT for the period 1998-2003, http://www.uvm.dk/pub/1998/ICTstrat/1.htm. The plan describes five central areas:
| the pupils and ICT, |
| the teachers and ICT – The ICT Driving Licence |
| the subjects and ICT |
| equal and flexible access to lifelong education |
| coordination of ICT-based research and education. |
With this action plan the Danish Ministry has given the educational world and the individual teacher some guidelines for the work, and thus also an official confirmation of the work carried out in the transnational teleprojects..
In-service training courses in Denmark have differed in contents, length and form. As for our part we have run an ODL course in introducing how to run teleprojects over the past nine years with participants not only from Denmark but also from the other Nordic countries.
As an example of the many initiatives taken based on the action plan, the Danish Ministry of Education, The Royal Danish School of Edcuational Studies, UNI-C (provider of the Danish Schoolnet) and the Danish National Brodcasting Corporation (DR), the Danish Teachers’ Union and others have introduced a large scale in-service training course on how to implement the use of ICT in all subjects the so-called: ’ICT Driving licence’ course. The first teachers will have the licence in the spring of 2000.
Why European in-service training courses?
Four years ago three ESP coordinators from Norway and Denmark felt that the teachers’ networks within ESP had created a consciousness and a motivation for cooperating in other contexts such as international in-service courses.
The pedagogical, scientific and technological developments as well as the introduction of the EU sponsored Socrates and similar programmes meant that it was feasible to bring these ideas into life.
EUN Member states…… ESP etc. |
In the following we’ll give a short account of the objectives and outcome of some of these international in-service courses.
PIST
’The project makers - in-service training for educational key personnel on how to make educational projects, find partners and develop projects’.
The organisers of this Comenius Action 3.2 course were besides the ESP coordinators already mentioned, a colleague from the Highland Council of Education in Scotland. We ran two courses one in 1997 and one in 1998 in Norway and Scotland respectively. The number of participants were between 30 – 50 from 13 – 15 different European countries.
The main aims of these two courses were:
Experiences from these courses resulted in yet another Comenius Action 3.2 course TRANSPRO with our Czech ESP-coordinator as the representative for the fourth country in the collaboration. The TRANSPRO courses are to take place in Prague, the Czech Republic and Haugesund, Norway in the spring and the autumn of 2000. A final conference with dissemination and evaluation results of the work will take place in Copenhagen in May 2001.
Educational materials
Already after the first couple of years of collaboration within ESP, ideas of producing educational materials based on the experiences gained, arose. First in the teaching of German and in the following years for English http://www.esp.educ.uva.nl/image-UK/ and French: http://www.esp.educ.uva.nl/image-FR/ are now accessable on the Internet in digital versions.
Our colleagues within the science group have in the same way produced very useful educational materials to be used in the environmental transnational projects: http://www.shuttle.de/h/dadoka
The Nordic-Baltic Language Project
The idea of running an in-service course for teachers of foreign languages came into being during the summer of 1998 as an initiative of our Estonian ESP-coordinator.
In September 1998 a three day in-service seminar took place in Estonia with teachers of German and English from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland and Denmark – 30 teachers in all. The Estonian crew together with the Danish ESP-coordinators acted as organisers and trainers, and our Finnish ESP-coordinator contributed as a trainer for the workshop for teachers of German.
The aims of this course were to focus on:
| The cultural dimension in language teaching |
| Introduction of the materials: ’Das Bild der Anderen’ and ’The Image of the Other’ |
| Designing transnational projects on the basis of the ’Bild’ and Image’ material |
| An evaluation of the 15 teleprojects that were launched in Tallinn in 1998. |
| What was in common for both type of the courses was, that they proved the importance of: |
| Meeting colleagues from other countries |
| Having a platform where you can discuss pedagogical issues and the possibility of implementing them in the daily work like the project method/the cultural dimension |
| Recognizing the European diversity |
| Creating a human network in order to create the virtual network |
| Finding common objectives for the collaboration |
| Being aware of the fact that moderating on-line learning activities demands new teaching strategies |
| Addressing the individual needs of teachers according to their own context (i.e. country, school, classroom). |
| Having headmasters and other decision makers positive towards the project the teacher will be engaged in. |
| Evaluating the outcome of the transnational teleprojects. |
| Giving the participants access to personal support and guidance as a follow-up by the course organizers and trainers whilst running the initiated teleprojects (tools were listservers and www sites). |
Learning processes and didactics
Some of the following preconditions for successful in-service training in ICT and specifically telecommunication should be born in mind, if you aim at running successful teleprojects:
| Emphasis should be placed on training processes rather than products/materials |
| A major priority should be the change of teachers’ attitudes, since the teacher is the actual agent of innovation and change in schools. |
| Teacher training should be supported with the dissemination and analysis of models of ’good practice’, which can be used as stimuli of discussion, reflection and change. |
| Teachers should be involved in evaluation of existing learning materials and this reflective/evaluative activity could form part of their training and professional development |
Conclusion
Some of the observations made in the ESP-collaboration as well as at our in-service courses national as well as international during the past decade or so, show a trend towards ’process-oriented’ pedagogy rather than ’product-oriented’ or ’ knowledge-centered’ pedagogy.
We have to be aware that there is a shift ’from ’development of content’ to ’development of practices’ from text’ to ’context’…. In other words, the teacher herself is called to reflect on, evaluate and participate in the development of training content and materials. She is viewed more as a’contributor’ and ’builder’ of her own knowledge rather than the mere consumer of ready-made training content and materials. She is also viewed as a member of a ’network community of practice’, discussing and collaborating, reflecting and evaluating models, practices and materials.
ICT forces us to accept a different concept of learning as well as the fact that the teacher’s role is undergoing a change.
There is still a strong need for ’on-going teachers’ professionlisation and updating’.
Examples of good practice and digital educational material as inspiration for newcomers ought to be accessible on the web. Further (action) research is needed regarding technological and educational issues also with much emphasis and stress on the evaluation of transnational teleprojects in order to ensure a high quality of the projects and thereby enhance education.
Articles in proceedings from the ESP-Conferences held during the years 1990 - 99, K.M. Anttila & M. Eriksen
1991, 'The 4th International Conference of Computer Pals Across the World', Wolfenbüttel, Germany, proceedings.
1991, 'European Conference about Information Technology in Education', Barcelona, Spain, proceedings.
1992, Seminar in Tallinn with participants from Tallinn & Tartu Universities, Estonia, proceedings
1993, Council of Europe, 'Seminar on School Links and Exchanges', Stockholm, Sweden, proceedings
1993, Teleteaching, Trondheim, Norway, proceedings
1993, Tel-Ed Conference, Dallas, Texas, USA, proceedings
1994, Telematics in Education - the European Case, 'Telematics and Distance' Education, K.M. Anttila & M. Eriksen, Ed. Wim Veen, Betty Collis m.fl. ISBN 90-5478-028-2
1995,La communication télématique internationale, Écoles en réseau: Cooperation multiculturelle, K.M. Anttila & M. Eriksen, Ed. Rachel Cohen, Retz, 1995
'Schools in Network', Das Bild der Anderen' K.M. Anttila & M.Eriksen and others. CONTEXT 15, 1996
1998 Seminar: 'Application of Information and Communication Technology in Secondary Education', Moscow, Russia,
1998 GLobal Learning in the 21st Century, Copenhagen, Denmark, proceedings
1999, Conference proceedings from ED-Media 99, http://www.aace.org/conf/edmedia/99/report.htm
6. The authors
Kirsten M. Anttila and Mogens Eriksen work as Senior Consultants at the Royal Danish school of Educational Studies (RDSES) http://www.dlh.dk
We have worked within the field of ICT for the past 16 years and have served as advisers and researchers in several development ICT projects either initiated by the RDSES, in some cases in collaboration with the Danish Ministry of Education or 6.in development projects initiated by local authorities. Since 1987 we have functioned as co-ordinators, supporting Danish schools that wish to engage in collaboration via Internet with foreign peers around topics of mutual interest within the framework of European Schools Project (ESP).
We have been engaged as organisers and tutors in two Comenius 3.2 in-service courses: PIST and TRANSPRO. Courses that focus on transnational projects using the project method and ICT.
For the past eight years or more we have conducted in-service training courses as distance education courses under the auspices of RDSES in the use of Internet in education.
For more information see: http://www.copenhagen.dlh.dk/espdk/cv and http://www.esp.educ.uva.nl/
7.
Time estimated for the presentation: 30 – 45 minutes
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