E-Trainers free online training for vocational educators

E-Trainers is an EU supported project providing free online training for educators in the vocational education and training (VET) sector. There are three courses:  creating digital content, life and career skills, and  digitally competent and confident teacher. The courses are implemented in Moodle, with an appealing clean, no fuss design. However, the details of the course and quiz design is confusing.

Entry Test

I registered and took the entry test. My score was 12/14. But in a couple of cases I had to guess. The courses are provided in nine languages, so there are bound to be some translation difficulties. At one point the system lapsed into Italian.

Some questions were confusing, for example: "Which of these are video sites?", had two right answers, but I was only allowed to pick one. Another was a free text entry asking for an answer from some competency framework, which was not cited, so I had no idea what the answer might be. Another question said that a "flipped course" was an "online course", which I suggest is incorrect (it combines online and face-to-face).  But these are all minor quibbles.

I started with the first course:

Creating Digital Content

The course content itself is divided into very small web pages, with an image and a sentence or two, with about a dozen of these pages making up one lesson. These appear to be designed to fit on a smartphone screen without scrolling. However, this makes for very disjointed reading, especially on a larger tablet, laptop, or desktop screen. Even on a smartphone I would prefer larger chunks.

The first course, on  creating digital content, references the Co Building a Good Guidance project. This aims to improve students "active involvement" in school. It is an interesting approach to do this via online techniques.

The course suddenly takes a change of pace, going from offering single sentences to complex instructions for suggests entering a co-building international contest. I suggest not encouraging students, as their first exercise, to creating online content which will be made public and judged. 

Also, I suggest students should be introduced to content creation with text, and still images, first, and video later. Text and images are an easier introduction to preparing online content, these are the foundation for video, and are far more useful than video. However, the course frames the use of of text, and images as just a way to plan and prepare videos, not an important commutations media in themselves.

The course suggests using the Tricider free brainstorming tool. It gets a little confusing at this point, as brainstorming seems to be a broach in the course. Also, I could not work how to proceed without actually registering for a Tricider account. There is a similar branch for Padlet. This is not to say these are not good products, but I did not want to register at this time, and a student may want to use another product, or not be permitted to use these by their employer, or government. 

It is curious this EU endorsed project is promoting the use of Facebook and Google, given concerns the body has had concerning these companies. In particular the course recommends for teachers with students having special needs: "Teachers should help students to create Facebook and/or Google accounts."

I had completed 7% of the course when I gave up. I was not sure what exactly I still had to do.

Life and Career Skills

The second course is for VET  teaching. A survey of european employers is quoted as finding they want employees who have:

1. Positive attitude
2. Problem solving
3. Communication
4. Working under pressure / Resilience
5. Learning to learn
6. Flexibility
7. Personal discipline
8. Time management
9. Teamwork
10. Responsibility

Unfortunately there is no citation to where these results came from.  Also I have doubts about teaching behaviors, such as a "positive attitude". As an extreme example, I don't want the computer professionals I am training to say software is going to work, when their judgement is otherwise, especially for safety critical systems.

At the second step of this course I started to get a little frustrated. The second section "planning" started with a quiz question about competencies which had not yet been discussed, so how was I supposed to know the answer. Based on my knowledge of education (I have several qualification, and a couple of decades of experience) I guessed, and got it wrong.  I don't mind getting a question wrong, but I was not offered any remedial material to help me learn, but was offered another nine attempts at the same true/false question. I got the question right at the second attempt, but was none the wiser as to what this was about.

Then the details of a "PERSONAL COMPETENCE CARD" were detailed. However, the concept of what this was for, who developed or used it was not provided. I can guess that from the context, but a course should explain this explicitly.

8% into the course I gave up.

Future of Scholarly Publishing

The EU has released "Future of Scholarly Publishing and Scholarly Communication", by a panel of experts, including from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Elsevier, and Springer Nature. Not surprisingly, Springer Nature and Elsevier did not agree to the rest of the experts' recommendation to move to open access publishing as soon as possible.

I don't agree with one of the panel's unanimous recommendations: not to use journal-based metrics for hiring, promotion and tenure, and funding decisions. In my view, metrics are essential, but the right metrics.

Several recommendations urge balanced and diverse representation (gender, geography and career stage). Using blind reviews, not just for papers, would go some way to achieving this.

The expert group proposes a set of principles for scholarly communication:

"... accessibility, maximum usability, and accommodating an expanding range of scholarly contributions (data, software, new documentary forms, etc.).  ... a distributed infrastructure based on open standards to ensure access and interoperability. ... equity, diversity and inclusivity, and to the need for community building. ... quality and the integrity of scholarly contributions ... flexibility and innovations while also retaining its focus on cost effectiveness."

From "Future of Scholarly Publishing andScholarly Communication" (EU, P. 6, 2019).

Recommendations to researchers and research communities:

1. "When participating in research assessment, for example in hiring, promotion and tenure, and funding decisions, focus on the merits and impact of a researcher's work and refrain from the use of metrics - particularly journal-based metrics - as a proxy. In particular, they should incorporate the recommendations from DORA and the Leiden Manifesto into the assessment process.

2. Take responsibility for ensuring that all research contributions are made openly available, discoverable, and reusable according to agreed community standards (including the FAIR principles).

3. Increase awareness of, and sense of responsibility for, implications of choices and actions in roles as authors, reviewers and members of decision-making groups.

4. Strive for a balanced and diverse representation (in terms of gender, geography and career stage) when seeking collaborations, organizing conferences, convening committees, and assigning editors and peer-reviewers, and building communities such as learned societies.

5. Work towards increased recognition and appreciation of peer-review work as core research tasks. To this end, support greater transparency, including the publishing of signed reports. Support better training and inclusion, and focus on quality of the research in peer review.

6. In the case of communities of researchers, such as learned societies, develop policies and practices that support modes of scholarly communication in line with the vision outlined above. Along with universities, learned societies and other research communities need to alert and train their researchers to the importance and the responsibilities of communicating knowledge, either formally, through publishing, or through other means."

Universities and research institutions should:

1. "Develop policies and practices to ensure that all research contributions are made openly available, discoverable, and reusable according to agreed community standards (including the FAIR principles).

2. Promote and implement the recommendations of DORA and the Leiden manifesto to ensure that research assessment takes into account a wide range of scholarly contributions including research articles, preprints, datasets, software, patents and materials (e.g. in hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions).

3. In deciding which infrastructures to use, support, and contribute to, choose platforms using free or open source software, offering open data via an open license, and leveraging open standards where possible. Acting in this fashion will also reinforce researcher-led initiatives that aim to facilitate scholarly communication and publishing.

4. Strive for a balanced and diverse representation including, but not limited to, gender, geography and career stage) when hiring, seeking collaborations, when organizing conferences, when convening committees, and when assigning editors and peer-reviewers, and building communities such as learned societies.

5. In negotiations with service-providers refuse non-disclosure clauses and include clauses which enable cost and price control, and compliance monitoring. Strive to facilitate collective action with other institutions by e.g. sharing cost and price data through joint initiatives (e.g. OpenAPC)."

Research funders and policy-makers should:

1. "Develop policies - along with appropriate funding mechanisms - to ensure all research contributions arising from their funding are available to everyone, everywhere, without any barriers to access or restrictions on reuse.

2. When evaluating researchers, ensure that a wide range of contributions (scholarly publications, but also data, software, materials etc) and activities (mentoring, teaching, reviewing etc) are considered, and that processes and criteria of evaluation are both appropriate to the funder’s research programme, and transparent.

3. Develop funding mechanisms to support the development of open, interconnected and distributed scholarly publication infrastructures, and for their maintenance over the long term.

4. Consider how funding policies affect diversity and inclusivity of research on a global scale. In particular, funders should work to ensure that review boards, committees, panels, etc., are diverse - in terms of gender, geography, and career stage.

5. Work with the other actors in the scholarly communications ecosystem to ensure that the total costs of enabling research to be openly available to everyone, everywhere, without barrier or restriction, be also open and transparent."

Publishers and other service providers:

1. "Develop and publicly announce transition plans to move as soon as possible to comprehensive open access (Springer Nature and Elsevier have differing views with respect to this recommendation, a result of extensive disscusions in the expert group.)

2. Develop, use, and support interoperable tools (including open source software wherever possible) and services not only to facilitate access and reuse of scholarly outputs, but also to facilitate innovative interventions of new entrants.

3. Strive for balanced diversity (including, but not limited to, gender, geography and career stage) among authors, reviewers, and editors who work with publications.

4. Foster transparency and accountability in peer review, for example by publishing peer review reports and author responses alongside the published articles

5. Make all publishing charges public (including special pricing and waivers), and provide full descriptions of services provided, in order to enable the development of a transparent and cost-effective marketplace designed to support the open communication and reuse of all scholarly contributions.

6. Experiment with new approaches to the evaluation and communication of research outputs, and share the outcomes so that a body of evidence can help to optimise future systems."

Practitioners, educators, and other societal groups:

1. "Organize and advocate for free access to, and right to reuse of, publicly funded research results.

2. Reach out to funders, research institutions, and policy makers in order to develop new communication channels, new forms of co-creation and co-planning of research, and new forms of funding in response to needs, concerns and issues emanating from the population at large.

3. Look for opportunities to engage with research topics / results that are of interest to societal groups and their communities.

4. Bring forward research topics/questions that are mis- or underrepresented (e.g. by contacting relevant researchers, attracting the attention of other actors in the science system, or mobilising action in organised interest groups)."

EU Digital Competencies for Teachers Project

The EU funded Digital Competencies for Teachers Project (DIGICOMP) has provided a Moodle based e-Learning Portal for teacher training. There is a leaflet explaining the project and a sixteen page Methodology for Preparation of Materials.

I signed up to try the e-learning.  DIGICOMP uses the Moodle lesson. The student is presented with a small amount of text and then a quiz, in the style of many self paced on-line courses. I started by selecting "Information", but got stuck on the first quiz. This asked me to pick which were browsers from a list. I selected Firefox, Opera and Safari. I clicked "continue" was told these answers were correct but was then presented with the same quiz again.

Apparently I had not selected all the browsers. However, the other choices were Google, Facebook, and iPhone 6, none of which are browsers. The Google browser is called "Chrome", Facebook is a social media platform and iPhone 6 is a smart phone.

Even if my answers are not correct, there should be a way to proceed past the quiz without having to make all nine attempts.

After nine attempts I was able to move on to the second part of the lesson entitled "Browse (Google) Like Ninja!". There is no good reason to mention Google so prominently in a course (unless the project is being funded by the company). Also there is no need to use jargon like "Ninja". Perhaps these are early days for the project and this is just a Alpha version of the course.