1. Introduction

Dear Friend,

Welcome to the “The mobility guide on-line - Planning and management with ICT support” Course. This introduction unit will present the structure and the general organization of this on-line course. It will help you to develop a general mobility or scholarship project plan and possible ICT tools that would support it. We assume that you take this course becauseyou’re your work involvement, but in the timeframe we have chosen we will not discuss in detail the specific requirements of different grant applications, which could extend the study time significantly. This course will serve as a good basis to develop a brief, but complete plan that can be used s for:

At the end of this course, you will:

  • Find possible partners;
  • draft a needs analysis;
  •  draft an appropriate project plan;
  • draw up a budget calculation;
  • be familiar with the different forms of mobility, with particular emphasis on virtual mobility;
  • understand the challenges of virtual mobility;
  • have a better overview of web development;
  • check the tools that may facilitate the implementation of virtual mobility;
  • be capable to configure these tools to your own context.

You will need approximately 10 hours complete this course (20 minutes for this introduction)

Although this study time seems to be relatively short, you will possibly need two months to complete the course. By taking one unit per day, this module can be easily completed within three weeks but there will be activities that might require a few days reaction or discovery time.

1. The course structure

This course is addressed to teachers who work in secondary (high school, general or vocational educational establishments) or higher education. The work situation that we modeled is, that your students are preparing to undertake a mobility period abroad, or you are hosting students from abroad. It may also be the case that you our your colleagues prepare teacher mobility for your teacher further education. Another possible scenario can be that this course will raise interest of teachers who are keen to improve their knowledge in the field of mobility by this guide.

The course is divided into two modules:

The six units of the project planning module are:

  1. Introduction
  2. The project summary and selection of partners
  3. Planning and implementing the needs analysis and mobility type
  4. Planning and working out the mobility project application
  5. Planning and working out the budget
  6. Assembling and finalizing the application

OER 1. Introduction to: Planning a project

If you are more interested in the first module, look at this teaser on planning a mobility project.

http://liedm.net/portfolio/planning-a-project/

The ICT module is divided in 8 units:

  1. Physical or virtual mobility?
  2. Examples for virtual mobility projects
  3. The characteristics of Web 1.0 and web 2.0
  4. Capitalisation ICT tools
  5. Cooperation ICT tools
  6. Collaboration ICT tools
  7. Coordination ICT tools
  8. Learning platforms

OER 2. Introduction to: ICT for education

If you are more interested in the second module, look at this teaser on ICT in education.

http://liedm.net/portfolio/ict-for-education/

2. The unit structure

All units start with an introductory part that presents the subject's issue and clarifies the unit's objectives.

The length of units are between 30 minutes and 1 hour.

Each unit will explain the basic knowledge linked to that current subject and will offer practical activities to facilitate the understanding through specific examples or will let you adapt the problem to your own environment.

Practical activities are regularly included in the units with the aim to

As this course is a work based learing course, these units will be most beneficial should you already have a mobility or grant project in mind. In case you are generally interested in mobility and ICT tools, we strongly advise you think of an imaginative (“fake”) project to work on. These units therefore invite you a snowballing technique to develop smaller parts of your idea than to collate them in a bigger plan. We also invite you to use OER materials in the course.

3. Why did we choose this topic?

Nowadays two mayor issues arise when we work in the field of mobility: To work out a good and winning project plan, and to use effective tools to fulfil it. This course decrease the challenges of planning the mobility and breaks the barriers between you and ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) in teaching and, in particular, in virtual mobility. Hence, it covers two European priorities: education and training mobility on the one hand, and acquiring IT skills on the other.

As we will see throughout this course, the good planning of the project and the integration of ICT to teaching and training are preconditions for the increasing of the European mobility activity.

4. How to get most out of this course?

This on-line course is work - based, which means it is advisable not to “read” the activities but really do them. As previously mentioned, it is essential that you really work on your own mobility project idea and convert it into a project plan with use of ICT. It is also very important to analyse current mobility offers, regardless of your expertise of former mobility programmes.

OER 3 – Work based learing

If you are more interested in work based learning study this OER:

http://liedm.net/portfolio/work-based-learning/

Another opportunity to learn effectively and stay motivated is to communicate:

5. Who will help you?

This also depends on you. As we have developed a work based learning course we have built on the Mentorship method. This method is described in more detail at point 2. here:

https://moodle.liedm.net/mod/book/view.php?id=1519&chapterid=119

So we assume that you have already a mentor or tutor at your institution. If not, try to choose a mentor. Who can be a mentor?

“A mentor: somebody from your colleagues who can informally help you in discussing your thoughts and ideas, giving you feedback. You will see our reminders to do so at some activities. We would kindly ask you here to choose an appropriate mentor for the time you are studying our course.”

We advise you to build on three possible core people:

Your selected team of people will help you during the learning period by:

If you follow the blog posts you may find some help and inspiration from other learners’ posts.

6. Learner support

If you learn this course in an organized way (Distance on-line learning), your tutor will support you throughout the course. However, there are some limitations to this personal support upon your learning contract with the delivering institution.

Dear friend,

After having become aware of the structure and topics that will be covered during the course, we would advise you to start with the first unit.