The REX VET project in one year: the updates from the partnership
It is almost one year we are living these weird times. The virus affected our lives and, of course, our international projects. Nevertheless, it has been a positive year for the REX VET partnership.
When it was approved in 2019, we had lot of expectations, we started working very well since the kick-off meeting held in Bilbao, with a very good plan but then the COVID broke in our daily life and we re-arranged our plans. No one of us could have never imagined that this year would have been like the one we experienced.
We made the changes needed mainly turning everything online. Starting the project face-to-face gave us the possibility to become familiar with each other and to work in an easy way also remotely but working virtually on the model for internationalisation was not that easy. Online meetings are fine for the administration tasks and monitoring but when you want to develop something new, you certainly miss the dialogue and the inspiration you get from the others. We created and re-created the outline of the career model for VET staff members, we gathered different inputs, conducted focus group interviews and consulted human resources people. Because of the virus we are running a bit behind schedule, but it also gave us more time to go deeper and achieve better results.
In this year we have also learnt two important things we don’t have to forget: internationalisation begins at home and it doesn’t have to be always linked with travels.
Moreover, this first year highlighted the importance of the internationalization for VET improvement. It has also clarified that we do a lot of internationalization that we don’t label as such.
With this project we want to develop an easily achievable method for increasing the internationalisation skills of teaching and management staff. This development takes place through the Open Badge system, which is a completely new thing for some of the partners and a little familiar to a few of them. So, we worked with Open Badge definitions and planned coaching material for each badge, we divided project members into smaller groups to work effectively. Finally, work proceeded well even if we couldn’t arrange nothing but online meetings during this year.
We have big hopes in the results of the project. Some of us have made staff training a priority for the upcoming years and hopefully we have many teachers and other staff members climbing up the ladder from a rookie to an expert.
REX VET blog: https://rexvet.wordpress.com/
