Between September 29th and 30th, the consortium of partners has managed to run the 2.0 version of the C1 Activity – Training of Trainers for Digital Education. This time, completely based on the e-Learning Platform.
The experience from summer has shown us that digital youth work upgrade online is possible, and can even be more efficient if it is connected to digital education.
Whilst the aim of the first C1 was to pilot the teaching content of the 6 modules and experiment with new teaching methods, the aim of the second C1 Activity was to further integrate the platform and gain feedback on the experience of using it in a teaching and learning context.
Armed with the knowledge and lessons-learned from the first trial of C1, the consortium of partners of the D(at)YW project organised a second version of the activity, giving a test-ride for the brand new e-Learning Platform: digital-youthwork.4learning.eu.
The e-Learning Platform, featuring e-Academy, e-Community and e-Resource Data Bank, was developed as part of the Intellectual Output 3 (IO3-A1), and is meant to revolutionise blended-learning for young people and youth workers.
Each of the partners took responsibility to integrate a specific part of the platform in their session, whether that be: e-Academy, e-Assessment, e-Community, e-Resource Data Bank, My Account, Open Badge/Certificates.
The Platform was realised just in time for C1 Activity in the end of September, so that instructors could get a chance to fine-tune the settings and run online classes.
Thanks to the evaluation survey, prepared by the Lancaster and Morecambe College, we have quite a good picture of how it was.
According to the survey, 50.0% of the participants thought the overall training was very good, 42.9% thought it was Good and 7.1% thought it to be Satisfactory. In order to gain some insight of why the participants responded as they did, they were asked to indicate their expectations, if these expectations were met, likes and dislikes of the session.
The expectations of the participants included:
“Checking the e-learning platform and that it is working okay”
“Get to know better the functionalities of the platform”
“To better understand the platform and see how it can be used within the lessons/planning”
The most common expectation of participants was to be introduced and learn about the platform, from learning how to navigate around it, its capabilities, any bug finding and not least from the trainer’s standpoint of how to incorporate the platform in the context of a lesson.
The participants were then asked to feedback on different organisational aspects of the training such as the communication for the preparation, the session structure, the opportunities to feedback and the accessibility. The Part 2 of the C1 was designed from the learnings of the Part 1, this included integrating more breaks. All responses except one reported each of these aspects as being good, very good or excellent.
The 6 different aspects of the platform as introduced one per partner were then evaluated. For each area participants rated from options ranging from unsatisfactory to excellent. 93.3% of participants rated both the e-Academy and the e-Assessment between good and exceeding expectation, 100% of participants rated the e-Resource Bank , the e-Community, the Open Badge/Certificate as good to exceeding expectations.
There was also an open text box that encouraged additional feedback. One comment identified that in the e-Academy it was sometimes “not clear if the courses were for the level of beginners or intermediate”, this issue was also discussed during the feedback within the session and due to a technical error that can be immediately rectified. It is these kind of scenarios which show the benefit of piloting the resources.
Participants expressed the overall experience of the platform as positive:
“Better than Moodle”
“Feel much more confident”
“It was very smooth and easy to navigate”
“I have enjoyed it a lot, it was very user-friendly and easy to use”
Overall, the C1 Part 2 was a great learning experience and opportunity to test the platform. The part 2 of the C1 was a success in that specific aspects were identified for improvement and both learners and trainers were inducted to the platform.
100% of the participants reported that they would return to the platform on their own initiative to engage with the online courses.
Special thanks to Ellie Devereux for compiling the survey results and evaluating the materials.