 Yes, so it's a completely different setting, so forget everything Colin told you, we'll go for something completely different. I'm from the University College of Leuven Limburg in Belgium and I headed two projects which developed online learning for teachers in secondary education and primary education. So what I'll do is I'll talk about the context a bit because it's a quite different context than you might be used to. Talk about two different postgraduate certificates that we developed and then look into the educational designs for both of these and do a compare and contrast and then leave some time for Q&A. So Belgium is complex, we have French speaking, Flemish speaking, German speaking. I'm talking about the north part of the country where we speak Flemish, our version of Dutch. About seven million people, compulsory education from the ages of five to 18 and divided into primary and secondary education five to 12, 12 to 18. If you're interested there's a bitly link about education in Flanders. The schools are either certified by the state or they're not. Those that are certified are also financed by the state and the teachers are paid immediately through the state so it's not the school that pays the teachers, it's the state that pays the teachers and it's the state that defines how many teachers can be applied, employed based on the number of students. Since 2021 the state has also decided to pay educational technologists before they had to be paid out of whatever means the school was able to scramble together and ask some teachers to not teach a few hours but be engaged with educational technology and the state decided that they needed two types of staff to support teachers in educational technology. They needed the ICT coordinator which is a technical person who does all the networking in schools, who does all the handling of iPads or laptops and they needed the pedagogical ICT coordinator. So the state defined two sets of qualifications for teachers or staff that want to take this role within the school and what the state also did was look at what kind of competencies do you need as an ICT coordinator. So it defined between technical tasks, pedagogical tasks, policy and vision and administrative tasks. So you can see here all the kind of things that fall underneath these four categories of tasks and then they said well the function of pedagogical ICT coordinator looks mainly at technical basis and then the pedagogical basis. They need to have some knowledge of vision and policy and a bit of administrative skills whereas the technical ICT coordinator is supposed to look at the technical and the administrative stuff. So user management within the VLE that kind of stuff. So the state has definitely decided there are two types of functions, two types of roles within a school for ICT support staff and based on that we developed two separate postgraduate degrees because they're quite different roles that people need to take up. We're not the only University of Applied Science who does that so there's four others who do postgraduate certificate on pedagogical ICT coordination and three others who do technical ICT coordination. It used to be two more so two schools already decided to stop offering this postgraduate degree. I'll come back to that later. So we developed two programs and we had a number of common goals within the University. So one was a practice oriented professional development, the other was flexibility in time and place, autonomy and self-directed learning because these are professionals who do this during their working hours, during their family time and if possible make use of existing force materials because we also offer students in secondary education a program directed towards ICT in schools and so we decided to look into whether these existing materials could be reused. So we developed two different online programs. The first one is underwears technolog which means educational technologist and the second one is technical ICT coordinator. At both postgraduate level we don't enforce that so people don't have to have a graduate degree but that's you know administratively that was the easiest to handle. A part-time program 22 to 24 ECTS you know the term ECTS European Credit System so the full course load is between 550 and 700 study hours. A full one-year program for a new student is 60 ECTS so that you can compare that as one-third of a full load of study. But also some of the participants decide to take only some modules and not the whole program so we're quite flexible in that. They're not usually after the degree that they get at the end they're looking for professional development whether it's for the whole course or just part of it. They combine it as I said with jobs and family and we expect the workload to be 15 to 20 hours a week which is quite a lot if you are employed and have a young family. So what we wanted to do was make the assignments as close as possible to the tasks that they fulfill within their school so that they don't have to take that you know mental distance from the work that they're doing. We tried to have the assignments as close as possible to the regular tasks. So these are the the curricula for the two programs. As you see both have policy issues at the top so that's a joint course and both also have ethical and legal issues at the bottom which is also a joint course and all the rest are different modules. I'll leave that up there for a minute so as you see the one educational technologist is mainly about pedagogy, didactics, you know, supporting teaching, supporting learning with ICT, coaching stakeholders, that's usually parents and secondary education, fellow teachers. Whereas the technical ICT coordinator is a much more technical program. It's about computer systems, it's about networking, system management security, web design. So it's a quite different kettle of fish. And so we chose two quite different educational designs as well. Technical ICT coordinator started from existing ICT campus classes that were being taught to 18 to 20 year old students on campus in a hybrid room and they would be streamed towards those people who were not at location. So and they would be recorded so they could look at them later on. The VLE functions as a learning guide. The class recordings are available, learning materials are available, exercises and assignments. And the learning principle is individual learning. So when you're ready, when you have the time, look at the recorded lecture, do the exercises. The results of the exercises are sent to the coach and the coach goes into individual feedback mode. So he gives you and the coaches reported that they would often be working from 10 to midnight on days of the week because that's when the students were learning. Whereas the approach for the education technologist was quite different. We decided to start from scratch, not look at anything that was available, but look focus on the group of learners. So the expert learners who already are working in that area and who can share experiences with each other. So learning principle was a network learning, sharing of experiences and cases. And the guideline throughout the program was Tuesday evening when we would have a synchronous session from 7 to 9 in the evening, live and recorded. So those who were there could contribute, those who weren't there could contribute later on in discussion for on teams. So learning environments were quite similar. But the one on technology, the educational technologist was much more focused on group learning and sharing. So the teams environment was the place to be, whereas in the other course the VLE was the place to be. There's hardly any sharing between students within that group. Assessment is similar. So it's two term marked assignments. There's no exam at the end. We didn't feel it was very valuable for that target group to have exams. So made up assignments that were close as possible to their daily practice. Flexible deadlines, which means that towards the end of June, when exams start in secondary education, they don't have time to do the assignments. They take the summer holidays to do. We had synchronous classes as said in the first group, so the educational technologist on Tuesday, that would be either the tutor or an invited speaker. Whereas the other group had only synchronous classes as joint feedback moments. So there was no real content offered within the synchronous classes. These were quite similar, asynchronous tutoring. But it turned out that where we had the situation of individual learners, there was a lot more email being sent back and forth. In the group situation, there was a lot of team channels being used for discussion. So they didn't fully rely on the tutor to give feedback. They relied on each other to get feedback. Teacher mindset in both cases were quite similar. Whereas as a coach, a tutor, a motivator. But the first group would look at the network and the group and try to motivate the group instead of the individual. Of course, we looked at quality assurance. This program has run for two years now. I forgot to say that. So after every run, every semester, we would run the course. Teachers would ask participants for feedback and then adapt the courses based on that feedback. So the four runs that we've had so far are completely different from the one that we started with is completely different than the current one. So we used online survey focus groups. And also just during the course, people would give feedback. This session last week was really worthless. Let's not repeat that. It's quite confronting for teachers. Two of my teachers said in December last year, I don't want to do this anymore because they're so critical. And anything I try, they have some feedback, some remark about why it's not functioning. So it was quite confrontational for them as well. So we've had up to 80 participants in the last two years. So 40 a year. Study success was about 70%, which is to be expected from a fully online program because people drop out. They don't find the time to put in the hours that is needed. They did mention it to us. They didn't just disappear. They called the program director or the tutors and say, I'm sorry, but I don't have the time. It's not that I don't appreciate what you're doing, but I just don't have the time. So there's no really disappearing students. They just mentioned to us that they weren't able to continue. The ICT coordinator group, we invited them to participate in focus groups and surveys, but no one responded. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was because they had this individual program. So the tutors mentioned that the ones that have given feedback were quite positive, but we don't know. Whereas the other group, the educational technologists, we had a focus group and a survey. No, just not a high level of response, but they were quite satisfied. And they used the word of mouth also to attract new students. They were quite satisfied because of the online course design, saying that the assignments were close enough to their actual day-to-day job that they could have sensible feedback and sensible learning as takeaway. Even the theoretical models where we were kind of, do we want to inundate them with the theoretical models? They were quite happy about that because it allowed them to take a bit of distance from their daily practice and look at what the theory says about or what research says about what they were doing. They were quite pleased with the coaches, especially in a past replies to any questions or issues that they had. Even though it was purely online, they felt as a group at the end of the year. And some of them even went on to go to educational learning conferences and flounders, met each other and interacted like friends as it were. That's what they gave back to the focus group. They would be interested in the refresher sessions or webinars about current topics. There you go again, generative AI. Just to know what they have to do with it. Do they need to do anything with it in secondary education or just forget about it? That's the kind of answers that they're looking for. And they would appreciate an annual networking event which we're not sure whether they would actually come because they're from all over the country and also from the Netherlands. So taking four or five hours to drive somewhere for a three-hour meeting. I'm not sure whether it would work but we can investigate. So conclusions. Both approaches have a fairly high dropout rate. It's quite stressful but also quite successful for those who can continue on, those who persevere. Find that they have something out of that year that they spend on it. Participant satisfaction is high for the one group. We don't know about the other group which makes it quite hard to compare the two learning designs. In my view the group design worked because I was the one that started that but the participants also gave back that it worked. We don't know about the individual program. If I look at the year that's starting now there's about 15 people enrolled for the group session but there's only one person enrolled for the individual one. I'm not sure whether that says anything. You don't know. There's a teacher shortage in Flanders so they don't have the time to invest in professional development especially since it's become more expensive. And then the question we have to ask ourselves as an institution is this a program that we can sustain financially because if we only have 15 participants a year that's just break even but if it's less than that then we need to stop offering that. So my conclusion is that time will tell if either of these approaches will continue to be successful. I'm hoping against hope maybe that we can attract students again but we'll have to wait and see. These are my co-authors. This was a project co-financed by the European Union. I know Britain is no longer part of the group. We still get money from the European Union. Luckily and this was funding based on the COVID pandemic so and these are some references if you would be interested. Okay thank you. Thank you very much for your comparison between four different approaches so it takes a very interesting time. Is there any questions? Yes. Thank you for the presentation. The workbook is quite hard and this seems to have to do with the problem. Are there any plans to produce this in the future? Do you have any indications that some courses might be less useful that you're thinking of maybe strapping? The thing is we can only get financing if we have 20 credits a year. If it's less than that we can't get any financing. So we have to balance between. I worked at the Open University in the Netherlands before where we had this opportunity to spread out. We noticed that the dropout rate didn't change very much whether there was more spread or less spread. So the more you spread it the less the motivation will be to continue because then you spread over two years instead of one year. So we're not really looking into spreading it for a number of reasons. That's a very good question. Thanks. Yes. I wanted to just mention this in terms of the dropout rates and how you can compare when you sit with the question as to whether this is something that continues to report. I think those two go hand in hand. In the same stats it's not, it's disappointing that they're not supplying about dropout rates because within the profession there's so much change happening, especially with technology and technology being embedded into education. And I think hand in hand, I think we're sitting with this method. I think we're sitting at a point of change in the sense that I think of that institution but then it comes to the realization in the very end of the future that more technologists on the news are various different disciplines. And when that cost happens, I think we're going to realize what we've done here is going to very much be worthwhile on the board. But two reasons. One, technologists are going to have more time to domain, to self-improvement. And you're probably also going to get more into specific new technologists as well. I think it's very true. I do think we're realizing that institutions are important to technology and that there are more and more and we see there's no use here in Britain such as the NHS and things like that that are actually available in certain parts of the world. But I would say definitely trying to be to learn about this. I think what we're facing in Flanders especially is the teacher shortage. So if a teacher has a background, any background, I mean it doesn't really matter. And he normally spends 10 hours a week working on the technology. He's now asked to teach French or mathematics because there's no one available. So that's the thing we have to deal with those schools that are really, really looking for teachers to do them the real teaching stuff that they asked them, please don't spend any time on professional development this year because we need you to teach French or mathematics or whatever. And that's the point where we are and it seems that it will take at least five more years this teacher shortage. But still we need to offer this kind of program because the participants also said we need this to be able to function. We need the background to do our job, but the job now is teaching French instead of working in the technology. So that's the harsh context we're working. Can you say a little bit about how the funding was one shot funding based on the COVID pandemic, given to the Flemish Department of Education. So the the rules weren't set by the European Commission. The rules were set by the Flemish community and the Flemish Department of Education said this is the funding that you can get and there's no change going there. We're already really pleased that they've decided to fund educational technologists since two years. That was unthinkable three years ago. That was just one grandfather of one of the kids coming into school and tinkering with iPads and laptops and that's still the case in many primary schools. So the idea that the Flemish community has decided this is something that we want to recognize as a professional function that needs professional development was unthinkable five years ago. So we're quite pleased with that, but then the teacher shortage happened. But thanks for the question. Um, experience in my case, I've done a similar group setting professional development about 15 years ago and noted that that was really successful at the time. It was already online. We started with a face-to-face meeting that had six or eight weeks of courses and then another face-to-face meeting and the people who participated in that was about 200. They were all very satisfied with that. And then I moved to the Open University and noted that those courses where there is group work happening were kind of motivating for the students as well. Those that were relying only on the individual work. If you are faced with job demands, family demands, and there's no one around you, no social network to pressure you into participating, then it's very easy to say, okay, I'll drop out. So we decided also that the teachers we had are in higher education and have very, they have experience in secondary and basic education. But the most experience was within the group of students. And so we felt that in order for them to get the most out of the experience was to share that expertise amongst themselves. Whereas the other designers felt that they need to be able to put together a network. They need to be able to open up a computer and decide which part of it is malfunctioning. So they focused really on the individual competences more than the group. So that was two different philosophical views of what good professional development should look like. That's an answer. Okay, so any other questions? What's the picture when it comes to digital capabilities development for general teaching education? The role of an educated technologist feels like a sort of transitional step. And I just kind of wondered what's happening with the rest of the... European Commission has, I think it was eight years ago, developed a framework called digital competence education. And that's the framework that the Flemish community has decided to be. That's just the framework that all teachers in Flanders will have to adhere to in the future. So if that's an answer. So we're looking at this European framework, digital competences in education, as the set of competences that all teachers should. And so I was in the teacher training department for secondary education, and all our students will now have to look into this competence framework and see where they are and what competences they need to work on. That's the general framework that we're functioning within. This is specifically, as you say, for ICT support. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Hello, speakers. Okay, so I... Now we move, okay. Thank you very much.