OFLEBO, an online teacher-training programme for teachers of French in Botswana as an example of professionalisation

Technology has influenced not only our everyday lives, but our education systems and the opportunities for teacher development. The introduction of information and communications technology has presented new training platforms to respond to the needs of the workforce. While traditional institutions have greatly impacted teachers, there are now other viable outlets through which many of the required 21st century skills, such as professionalism, can be satisfied. Our project OFLEBO is one such example, an online training tool targeting the teaching of oral skills for in-service teachers of the French language in Botswana. This area was chosen because of the teachers’ admission on finding teaching oral skills a challenging task. This paper therefore aims to study the professionalisation of teachers through the OFLEBO project. Professionalisation as a process is continuous, and practice is its focus, therefore the aim is to inspire the evolution of classroom practices concerning the teaching of oral skills.

An Evaluation of Local Mentor Support in AE E-Teacher Educational Technology Integration Online Teacher Training Course

This study addressed a different approach to online language teacher training programs. The researchers investigated the pros and cons of having local mentor support for an online course titled Using Technology in the English Language Classroom provided by the AE E-Teacher Program. The course was offered to preservice teachers from 24 different universities across Turkey. The study collected data through a pre- and post-online survey and individual semistructured interviews. The results revealed that while local mentoring as a supplement to the main course content contributed to teacher candidates’ emotional and professional attachment to their profession by helping them relate theory to contextualized educational settings, it can still be improved by the integration of more interactive tasks that would help the attendees refer to specific practical implementation of the educational technology tools introduced in the program.

Evaluation Results of an Online Teacher Training Course Specialized in Engineering Education

The purpose of this article is to present the results of the evaluation of the imple-mentation of a teaching training course in Engineering Pedagogy (EP) at a Chilean university of applied sciences. The research questions that guided the research process were: (i) How do the participants evaluate the course in general? (ii) How do the participants evaluate the didactic design of the course? (iii) How do they evaluate the teaching competencies? (iv) How do they value the usefulness of the learning outcomes for their teaching practice? (v) How they self-evaluate their participation and their learning process? Based on different authors a questionnaire with closed and open-ended questions was developed and implemented online. For the statistical analysis was applied an exploratory-descriptive analysis. The training course consists of two online modules with 90 working hours in LMS, and was designed by the Center of Engineering Education (CIEI) at the University of Talca, according to the IGIP Curricula of the IGIP center at the Technische Universität Dresden (TU Dresden, Germany). From the first results of the pilot project, it can be noted that there is a high level of motivation and interest to participate in a teaching training course based on EP, which has been specially oriented and designed to meet the specific requirements of the academic staff of engineering schools.

ECOLE

ECOLE is a Comenius 3 Network under the SOCRATES programme in the field of education running from 2002-2004. The main goal of Comenius Networks is to create links between projects carried out by school partnerships and those relating to the training of school education staff. This paper presents the outcome of the first year of the project with a special emphasis on the information and communication (ICT) infrastructure and the events. Project description covers an interactive website comprising information related to the activities of the network and an advisory reference point on running projects, database with projects, best practices, online teacher training, open working areas, project space, communication tools and so on.

Crossing boundaries: documentation of a teacher training course on design, robotics and coding

This article reports on the results of a teacher training course in which 41 teachers, working together with three university researchers, experienced a different way to engage in meaningful teaching and learning activities in design, coding and robotics. The course was run in an Italian school during the lock-down period of the Covid-19 pandemics. The training path had the objective to make the participants work differently, acting both as researchers and as teachers in training. The research reported in this article examined if and how an online teacher training course could act as a third space between school and academic cultures to achieve a negotiation of pedagogical practices. Findings from the study, collected through pre-post questionnaires and open-ended discussions, highlight an improvement in knowledge related to coding and robotics. Moreover, during the course, teachers experienced a new approach to space-time dimensions, first-hand experimentation and a collaborative approach, leading to greater perceived confidence in their skills and competences.

Suspending Classes Without Stopping Learning: China’s Education Emergency Management Policy in the COVID-19 Outbreak

Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 outbreak, an emergency policy initiative called “Suspending Classes Without Stopping Learning” was launched by the Chinese government to continue teaching activities as schools across the country were closed to contain the virus. However, there is ambiguity and disagreement about what to teach, how to teach, the workload of teachers and students, the teaching environment, and the implications for education equity. Possible difficulties that the policy faces include: the weakness of the online teaching infrastructure, the inexperience of teachers (including unequal learning outcomes caused by teachers’ varied experience), the information gap, the complex environment at home, and so forth. To tackle the problems, we suggest that the government needs to further promote the construction of the educational information superhighway, consider equipping teachers and students with standardized home-based teaching/learning equipment, conduct online teacher training, include the development of massive online education in the national strategic plan, and support academic research into online education, especially education to help students with online learning difficulties.