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:

• collecting a partnership to form a consortium around your plan,
• writing the specific applications. which will require some level of adaptation of your texts and figures when filling in the given forms (off-line or on-line);
• decide the form of mobility (virtual or traditional);
• list and select the most appropriate ICT tools for you to facilitate work in different mobility tasks from dissemination through project management till extension of the learning activity.

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

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

2. The unit structure

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

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

• facilitate understanding and
• gather relevant information.

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.

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

• Write also called educational blog: either on your favorite blog aggregator or on this Moodle portal, to share all your thoughts and feelings during the activities with other learners. This blog is shared only with this Moodle portal’s registered users.
• Open a topic on the project planning forum that you would like to discuss with your peers.
• Chat with your mentor or peers in the virtual consultation room.
• Send messages to your peers, mentor or tutor
• Upload your completed project plan to get feedback and informal evaluation from your mentor, or tutor.

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:

• A mentor in your institution described above,
• Partner(s) of the planned project: discuss and agree on the applied ICT tools mayor points of your ideas. You will see our reminders to do so at some activities.
• If you learn this course in an organized way: your course tutor.

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

• answering your Moodle messages;
• moderating the forums (Project planning and ICT Tools);
• reacting to your blog posts occasionally;
• consulting you in the moodle or other on-line chat room;
• if you have a course tutor: evaluating the tutor marked assignment you send at the end of the course.

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.