EduTrans21 – An Educational Transformation for the challenges of the 21st Century

The current situation in the world is characterized by huge challenges, which are roughly outlined by the following buzzwords

Digitization – Climate Change – Green Skills – Entrepreneurship – Inclusion  Pandemic

These challenges are accompanied by significant changes in the labour market. As a consequence, the educational system must react to the changes. In other words, what we need is an educational transformation for the needs of the 21st Century.

Exactly, that is the starting point for our project EduTrans21. Three partners have started on the path to meet the challenges of the future: Colegiul Tehnic Energetic Sibiu, ITECH Technical College Hamburg and the company INFRA:RUN, providing IT knowledge and open source solutions.

By and large, needed are VET schools, that are able to meet all requirements concerning the challenges in terms of infrastructure, methodology, skilled personnel, and additionally, that is able to quickly react to the fast changing conditions on the labour market.

There is broad agreement, that the skill needs very focus on transversal skills like outlined in the frameworks digcomp, entrecomp and 21^st century skills. In this respect, the methodological approach is provided. Project work, real challenges or action learning are appropriate approaches. And of course, work based learning is at the top of the agenda.

For the optimal support of the required change processes, the partners will train agile coaches based on curricula developped during the project.

Summarizing, the project has four objectives:

Objective 1: Development and implementation of a school evaluation for a strategic development plan Our objective is to identify and develop measures for school evaluation to do a SWOT analysis and to implement sustainable and goal-orientated school development processes. These processes focus on the Erasmus priorities: digital transformation, inclusion & diversity, the environment and fight against climate change, participation in democratic life as well as on agility and implementation of individualised learning arrangements.

Therefore, an institution-wide online assessment will be developed and carried out. The assessment will be based on frameworks like digicomp 2.1, entrecomp, 21st century skills, and green skills and will use the already existing quality mechanisms of the partner institutions.

Objective 2: Training agile coaches to support the educational transformation The participating institutions want to implement agile methodologies and mind set into their systems to gain digital readiness, resilience, and the capacity to handle changes well. To help this agile transformation, we want to train six “agile coaches” per institution, who support the organisation to become and remain adaptable and self-learning. As a result, our organizations will be able to adjust their processes and to involve all parties in the transformation process. Aspects of the training curriculum for the agile coaches are: moderation of change processes, (team-) coaching, agile project management and Design Thinking.

Objective 3: Integration of free and open source technologies By including INFRA.RUN, a non profit organisation whose slogan and goal is to “run free software, organised collectively, financed by contributions - not by selling data”, the project will ensure the integration of free and open source technologies (FOSS) at ITECH and CTE. In particular, the most important goal is the integration of video call and chat applications followed by document storage and editing. These functionalities will support and enable the exchange of the project groups, the training of the agile coaches, and the digital and inclusive learning arrangements.

Objective 4: Agile development of digital and inclusive learning arrangements in the field of sustainability. Within this objective, the agile coaches guide teachers to develop learning arrangements for trainees in the fields STEM. Together with the partner schools, these interdisciplinary and international projects will then be carried out digitally. The trainees will use their STEM skills to identify and analyse complex problems in the fields of climate change and sustainability and develop prototypes & concepts that help to solve the problem. Through this, the students will adopt an agile approach when working on the problems. Furthermore, all learning arrangements should meet the requirements of inclusion. The focus is on the inclusion of students with Asperger's and forms of autism.

The overall aim is to develop a pattern process for other VET schools.
 

Gunnar Binda
ITECH Technical College Hamburg
www.itech-bs14.de