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2022
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, there was an immediate need for rapid retraining and re-skilling as the workforce adapted to new health and safety protocols and shifted heavily toward remote working. Employers and post-secondary institutions (PSIs) responded with renewed interest in flexible, agile, and responsive systems of learning and work-relevant training that could connect them with learners and employment partners in both program design and delivery. Micro-credentials offer an exciting option for meeting these needs and are currently being explored in Ontario, across Canada, and around the world. Indeed, in just the last few months, a series of reports on initiatives have been published, helping to advance our evolving understanding of the function, governance, and context of micro-credentials in Canada. While these high-level conversations about micro-credentials are unfolding, it is critical to consider the lived experiences of those who are already developing and delivering them. Over the last three years, eCampusOntario has worked with a variety of partners to develop micro-credential initiatives at Ontario PSIs through a series of pilot projects. While each of these pilot projects is unique, they were all designed using the collaboratively co-created eCampusOntario Micro-credential Principles and Framework, a blueprint for creating and scaling micro-credential programs in Ontario. This report, which is part of a larger collaboration between eCampusOntario, external link, opens in new window, the Diversity Institute, Magnet, external link, opens in new window, and the Future Skills Centre, external link, opens in new window, focuses on these pilot projects to illuminate what is working, what is missing, and where we might be going when it comes to micro-credentials in Canada. We collected these experiences using a mixed-methods approach: 1) a survey of eCampusOntario’s micro-credential pilot project leads, and 2) a series of focus groups that included pilot project leads and community and employer partners involved in one of the 36 pilot projects. This approach was designed to capture the on-the-ground experiences of those engaged with the pilot program, and to explore their perceptions and beliefs about the future of micro-credentials in Ontario.
Post-COVID-19 Education: A Case of Technology Driven Change
https://www.scitepress.org/ProceedingsDetails.aspx?ID=ew9K0nh+658=&t=1, 2021
The transition from face to face to remote teaching during the COVID-19 health crisis, has been viewed by privately owned companies, prestigious universities, international organizations and politicians as an opportunity to promote the digital paradigm in education. A carefully carved rhetoric bundles the reduced funding of education, the maturity of digital technologies and the experience of remote teaching during the COVID-19 restrictions to promote the idea of rewiring and rethinking education as a synonym for change.
Journal of Education, 2021
There is general agreement about the need for vocational education and training to embrace so-called modern technologies in gearing up to deliver to young people a broad range of what have become known as 21st century competencies, of which digital literacy, self-directed learning, and adaptive learning are but three. Recent Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) policies in South Africa incorporate the language of future competencies that ought to be acquired by college students through their curricula and delivered by lecturers with appropriate professional training. But in April 2020, confronted by the global COVID-19 pandemic and an immediate hard lockdown, TVET colleges went into crisis mode to try to meet a government demand that no student be left behind. While blended and remote methodologies had been employed to some extent in a few college programmes, the pandemic suddenly launched all lecturers into technology dependent teaching and learning. This article ...
Journal of Educational Sciences, 2021
With the sudden widespread closure of schools since February-March 2020 due to the physical distancing measures associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital competences became a focus of attention, being of central importance to the swift and equitable transition to the various forms of emergency remote teaching implemented throughout the world as a strategy to insure continuity in education. This almost instantaneous mass shift to teaching online has made transparent great disparities in how digital competences-particularly those of teachers-were conceptualized, taught and assessed within various educational programs. We present a comparative analysis of the approaches to teachers' learning and professional development that state and non-state actors in four Central and East European countries have articulated in the first months of COVID-19 related lockdown. We take a Critical Frame Analysis approach to exploring the roles played by state and non-state actors in the four countries in conceptually framing the relationship between the digital competences required in emergency remote teaching and teachers' learning and professional development at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. It is suggested that the educational policy debate at the beginning of the crisis rendered visible: a) that this massive sudden shift required understanding digitalization as a complex multifaceted process requiring levels of digital and pedagogical competence teachers were unlikely to have previously developed; b) that addressing these issues through short-term interventions would only exacerbate the risk of ignoring arising equity issues; c) that situating emergency measures in the context of potential medium and long-term developments could open opportunities to explore mainstreaming the digitalization of education and promoting blended learning, as well as offer a better perspective on issues of digital poverty and the inequitable impact of not addressing it adequately will have in the future.
Sustainability, 2020
The objective of this research is to measure the perception that teachers had about their own performance when they were forced to carry out Emergency Remote Teaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A questionnaire was provided to teachers of every educational stage in the Basque Country (Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education, Professional Training, and Higher Education) obtaining a total of 4586 responses. The statistical analysis of the data shows that the greatest difficulties reported by educators are shortcomings in their training in digital skills, which has made them perceive a higher workload during the lockdown along with negative emotions. Another finding is the existing digital divide between teachers based on their gender, age, and type of school. A further worrying result is the lower technological competence at lower educational levels, which are the most vulnerable in remote teaching. These results invite us to reflect on the measures to be taken to improve equity, social justice, and the resilience of the educational system, which align with some of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Education and Information Technologies, 2023
The practice of digital technology in education was redefined in many ways by the first lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. While the pandemic, as in May 2023, is still changing and varies substantially across and within countries all over the world, educational institutional systems are constantly trying to find and adjust to what in this special issue is understood as ‘a new normal’. A new and different educational state-of-the-art emerged, characterised by its mode of leadership and teaching (online, blended, face-to-face) and content to be emphasised (e.g. subject knowledge and/or more generic competences such as (professional) digital competence, critical thinking, computational thinking, digital citizenship, in-depth learning, problem solving, and collaborative learning). Even though the focus and emphasis on digital competence and 21st-century skills were at large before the pandemic, it has certainly accelerated its acknowledgement and importance (Howard et al., 2021; Scherer et al., 2021). Moreover, the pandemic has brought the quality of both online and blended teaching, as well as the importance of digital technology and digital competence, to the forefront of educational transformation (Olofsson et al., 2021a). The pandemic forced K–12 and higher education teachers and students to perform online and/or blended teaching and learning, and the quality of this endeavour has been reported as inconsistent between and within educational institutions and contexts (Howard et al., 2021; Scherer et al., 2021). Moreover, it was much characterised by a crisis-prompted situation and not necessarily a situation for which neither educational institutions, teachers, nor students were prepared (Ewing & Cooper, 2021).
Learning and Teaching in Higher Education in Post-Covid Times: A Digital Transformation
Studies on adult learning and education, 2023
Learning and teaching in higher education can help to face the rapidly changing demands and transformations in social, professional, and individual life. «Digitalisation is not only an additional challenge but also an effective means to address key challenges for higher education in the 21st century» (Rampelt et al. 2019, 6). Digital practices in Higher Education forced by the Covid-19 disruption are challenging educational processes at every level. Digitization is here no longer just about the question of the technical dimension, but, about the structural interweaving and relational co-constitution of the digital with the social, the cultural, and the individual. Here the INTALL@home vision of learning international comparison without being physically mobile-theoretically framed and elaborated in this paper-starts.
Emvitet- project developing education 4.0 competencies - impacts and experiences during covid-19
Journal of Technical Education Science
The aim of this article is to describe the direct and potential impacts Erasmus+ Capacity Building Higher Education (CBHE) - Project called “Empowering Vietnamese VET teachers for transformation towards Education 4.0” (EMVITET)- after one year of implementation. Additionally, the survey findings also summarized the institutional and teachers’ personal experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic, which pushed Vietnamese institutions to rapidly transform their education to online environments. Qualitative data were collected with online questionnaires from six partner institutions and 35 teacher participants. The findings indicate that both individual teacher participants and partner institutions were given a boost to improve Education 4.0 competencies thanks to the participatory and collaborative approach of the EMVITET- project. The project was perceived as an useful external source for supporting the institutions’ management in organizing demanding online education during Covid-19 pan...