MESHGuides

In this discussion and comparison article, Cochran-Smith (2021: 8) firstly highlights the “enormous variation across countries among accountability policies, initiatives, and approaches as well as an array of competing claims about their efficacy and impact in teacher preparation.” Cochran Smith (2021: 21) discusses how notions of pedagogy are lost in many teacher education programmes, but that the concept of “intelligent professional responsibility” could provide a way forward, and that “there are efforts in teacher education to reclaim accountability with more intelligent approaches throu

Table: 1 Overview and description of the developed VOOC’s: title, audience, aims, medium and design.

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One of the major lessons underlined by Pro-VET’s Russian and Serbian partners was that developing VOOCs is considered a puzzle. Partners argued that it requires teams to constantly navigate between ambitions, goals, appropriate pedagogy, available resources and what is technically possible within the platform and used architecture of the course. A ‘balancing act’ between ambition and staying realistic. In other words: there is no ‘golden bullet’ for developing ODL tools. 

The Pro-VET project needs to be considered a unique case: Russian and Serbian (non-EU) professionals designing VOOCs with support of their Dutch, Finnish, German and Irish (EU) counterparts. Nevertheless, on an aggregated level, project partners experiences are universal and thus still extremely value for educational professionals with similar ambitions of developing MOOCs for VET teacher professionalization, worldwide.

This MESH guide is based on the EU Erasmus+ Pro-VET project. From 2019 to 2022, a team of Dutch, Finnish, German and Irish (EU) educational professionals joined their Serbian and Russian colleagues (non-EU) (until the invasion) in the development of Online Distance Learning tools. These tools – in Pro-VET known as Vocational Open Online Courses or VOOC’s – focused on various key aspects of state-of-the-art VET teacher professionalization.

In the survey, project partners were asked to reflect on Pro-VET and compose a series of concrete lessons, with regard to collectively developing VOOCs. The following main lessons can be drawn:

In the following we will summarize the impact of Pro-VET, as asked in the online survey sent to all project partners for this MESH guide. For partners personally, Pro-VET clearly meant a lot with regard to roughly: 1) developing VOOC’s as such, 2) getting to know new (more interactive) pedagogical approaches, 3) improving teamwork, 4) new national cooperation and international experience.

According to project partners:

For this MESH guide, project partners were asked questions via an online survey (see methods in 'design practices'). To begin locally, from within the local Russian and Serbian development teams, the overall development process was experienced as an interesting but rather ‘bumpy road’. Partners mention that while the overall teamwork was well-coordinated, it nevertheless took a lot of time and effort to make the course development process run smoothly due to various external and internal factors.