The ESW partners had an online training on PBL activities by UTC Warrington
On Friday 5th and Tuesday 23rd of February, the partnership of the project ESW met online to have a recap of the stay of play within the project ESW. The partnership also took the opportunity to organise an online training on PBL activities by UTCW.
EU Project Manager Luca Calligaro, from the Italian partner coordinator ENAC, welcomed the participants and gave a brief introduction to the meeting reviewing what was done so far and especially during the last year of the project, which in most cases was affected by the pandemic.
In fact, many activities were cancelled last year due to the restrictions, such as partner meetings which took another format passing to online meetings; as well as 3rd LLT and multiplier events. This affected the budget which was reviewed for each partner. Nevertheless, the partnership continued the piloting, had many bilateral meetings and organised an online dissemination event during EfVET Annual Conference, in particular during the session of the EfVET Roundtables which occurs every year in the framework of the Conference itself.
One of the updates is that due to COVID-19 crisis, CJD BBW Frenchen partner had some problems and had to withdraw from the project. However, within CJD, another branch joined the project: CJD Rhein-Pfalz. In this regard, all partners had the chance to welcome officially the new organisation.
Regarding the activities within the project in Italy the partners ENAC and ENDOFAP faced some difficulties due to longer periods of online education. At the contrary, the Spanish partners are in line with the schedule, since they have always been open, and they have older students.
At this point, Luca Calligaro introduced the webinar and explained the reason for the organisation of the online training which was about to start. The first reason was to discuss practical issues: f2f activities were planned but students are learning from home; the budget has been saved and needs to be reinvested; UTCW wished to share some good practices about remote learning tested in COVID time.
In this second part of the session Lee Barber introduced himself and the UTCW. His colleague Julie-Ann Wilson explained the good practice put in place in the school in a very detailed way which is followed at all levels of the school. She was then followed by the remote learning discussion presented by Alice Shaw. The interest was high and partners raised questions on many aspects.
The second day of the online training was focused on AECOM employer-led virtual work experience and Digital Built environment project-based lockdown learning. Challenges of teaching a practical subject remotely were also discussed: among them, there is the fact that students not always have access to digital devices, or they own a variety of different devices with different levels of compatibility. Sometimes the difficulty is due to the lack of Internet access, or many varied factors such as student engagement or self-isolation due to Covid as well as inability to provide feedback quickly and easily. However, to the challenges the partners from UTCW corresponded appropriate solutions, the recourses they use and how they assess students.
It was a very inspiring webinar for all partners in order to get inputs for improving online teaching methods and the assessment process.