Online training: the treasure within – Institut für Lern-Innovation

Online learning environments are widely used by training institutions but those tend to be used as content delivery, therefore a huge capability of those environments and teaching method is missed. Also, a lot of practitioners are engaged with training activities not being educators (tutors, facilitators, coach, mentors, team leaders, human resources departments…). The necessary background of pedagogies and techniques is missed and theoretical manuals are not the best way to make that kind of people acquire the necessary skills. They need some effective and practical way to learn. They have a lot of experience and expertise teaching face-to-face, but when having to do online training, they miss the digital skills and affordance of the technological capabilities.

We do not aim to create a manual for trainers, as there are a lot of already existing ones. We want to create an online course, together with a student’s workbook to directly teach future online trainers. We will reduce the theories to a minimum while focus on exercises and practise so they will feel the online environment as a learner.

The title of the project “online training: the treasure within” makes reference of our target activity, that is “training”, and the treasure makes reference to all the benefits that can be obtained from online learning: (1) learning the subject course, (2), new learning methods based on net-society (3) applied ICT competences, including soft-skills and transversal digital competences.

We aim to create a learners’ coursebook and an online course for trainers with low ICT skills and technological pedagogies so they can learn by themselves the application of technology enhanced education methods, techniques and tools, thus they acquire the necessary skills and competences to become successful online trainers (1st aim). We want to support them and facilitate the transferability of the skills and competences learnt to their own subject (2nd aim). Those skills include the use of technology for collaboration, creativity, problem solving, teamwork, etc. A tool will be made available (as online service), so they can use the lessons learnt in their own teaching activities (3rd aim).