 Hello, everyone. Welcome. And thank you for joining for this thematic webinar of the School Education Gateway, the initiative of European Union and as a place to engage with European policy and practice for school education. So my name is Inna and my colleague Eleonora today on the backstage are delighted to support you for this webinar and which will be dedicated to vocational education and training and work-based learning. Today we will talk about the innovative teaching and work-based learning practices that support students in obtaining the required skills and competencies that help them to meet the challenges of the working life. So our first presentation will examine how technology can be used to support the specific needs of that and also the obstacle space, especially in practical work-based learning. This information will be given by Andrew McCauchan, who is a senior expert in vocational education and training and director of Lexus Research and Consulting. He has spent almost all his 30-year career as a researcher and consultant in the field and conducting numerous European and international projects. Our second speaker, Monica Fasciani, a senior project manager at the Research Development Area of University of Studies, Guilhermo Marconi. Monica will tell us about her experience in managing the EVET project aimed at increasing the opportunities of initiating betmobile activities. And finally, the webinar will put a spotlight on this year's European Vocational Skills Week, which aims to change the perception about the value of vocational education training. Sue Bird, the policy officer at European Commission's DG for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, will help us to learn more about this initiative. So before giving the floor to our speakers, I would like to point out that this webinar will be recorded and the recording will be available on the webinar page together with the speakers' presentations. So you can pause any questions during the presentation in the chat box and we'll try to address as many questions as possible in the end of the webinar. So Andrew, if you're ready, I would like to give you the floor so you can start your presentation. Thank you very much, Illa. It's a great pleasure for me to be presenting to you this afternoon. It's my first time on the school education gateway and I'm delighted to be here. I see that we have people from all over the world attending, which is wonderful. I just to mention a few countries I've seen pop up, Zambia, Turkey, Portugal. So wide range of people. Before presenting my presentation, I'd actually like to ask you a few questions to get a better idea about who's in the room or who's in this Adobe virtual space. So I haven't done this before, but I'm hoping that Inna will place onto the screen a couple of questions that I'd like to ask just to get an idea of how often you've been using e-learning and digital learning technologies as a teaching aid, both in your own environment and also for your own learning and professional development. So here come the questions. So just allow a couple of seconds there for you to to click on boxes. And we see that it's in real time, of course. That's the second question. Inna, can we go back to the first question first? I guess we have to allow a little bit of time. Aha, okay. So we're now doing the question about your use of the e-learning as a teaching aid. Also, we've all been going through a learning curve. I think this is about the the fifth video conferencing platform I've used. And it's the first time I've been on this one. Excuse me for any errors in my own learning at the start. So interestingly, we have a quite a spread of people. We can't do any conclusions from this, but it's very interesting to see that in terms of using e-learning in your own learning and professional development, we've got quite a spread there across the different categories. It's still not settled down. So I think it's still open. So we have about a third of people maybe using e-learning once a day, if I can see this properly. But a similar number actually using it only occasionally. And the same actually applies a little bit for the using it as a teaching aid. So I think there's some similarities between those two bar graphs in terms of whether you're using e-learning for your own students, but also whether you're using them for your own professional development. That's great. So I think I give just a quick snapshot of our background of everyone who's here. And I think that's very representative of how the landscape is at the moment. I think with COVID-19, we've actually, well, we're short of data. I think we, being people in the research side of things and in the policy community, have been trying to generate data. And there's still a paucity of evidence. But it's very clear that we do have this spread of people in terms of their experience. And clearly that's impacting on learners as well. But I want to take in this presentation a step sort of sideways or slightly backwards to give you a sort of overall picture of digitalization as I see it in vocational education and training. Before Monica actually focuses down on a concrete example. It's a huge topic. I've got around 20 minutes. And so I'll do my best to cover the main points. I should say that I've been working with the Vocational Education and Training Working Group, which is covering digitalization and innovation and is coordinated by the European Commission. It's a working group of member states. And some of the material in here comes from that work. And our report is due out later in the year. So moving to my presentation. Okay, so what about the wider context for vocational education and training and work-based living? Well, we are living in a world of innovation and digitalization and also sudden dramatic shocks to that, of course. Innovation is key to economic and social progress. And we see innovation and digitalization itself taking place both outside of it and also inside that and they're related in complex, complex ways. Outside of vocational education and training, we have rapid automation, digitalization, new forms of work, ever faster product innovation driven by technological advances. Fourth Industrial Revolution, robotics, artificial intelligence. These are things that are now in the mainstream of everyday discussions about the economy and society. And I think one of the important points to appreciate is that the nature of this form of innovation, which is, in many ways, disruptive and radical because we have both new technologies and the emergency demand for new skills driven by digitalization in the labor market. So many people are talking about a revolution in learning. So it's important to see how VET is positioned to deal with this. And on the face of it, I think VET is quite well positioned to respond to these needs, to the challenges of innovation and digitalization in the wider economy and digitalization within VET has the potential to strengthen its response. There are maybe three areas that it's worth identifying in terms of VET's distinctiveness. In terms of provision, of course, we have this combination of school and work based learning of knowledge learning and experiential and practical learning. In terms of its constituency of learners, we have both young people and adults as well. We have also many young people who come from challenging socioeconomic backgrounds who are in the initial stages of education within vocational education and training tracks because of selection and tracking systems within countries. For adults, the economic changes we're seeing, changing the labor market are leading to demands for upskilling and rescaling and VET is also positioned to be engaged in that as well. On the employer's side of things, work based learning necessitates and needs for in company trainers to work alongside teachers within VET schools, of course, and employers who are seeing product and service innovation, see a rising need for digital and transversal soft skills. So both those things, digital skills, but also a wider set of softer skills. They need network forces. So what are we talking about when we talk about digitalization? Well, I've tried to capture the state of the art on this slide. It's not easy. When you look at the field, it's quite confusing and complex. We have open educational resources available, repositories of e-learning tools and courses and programs and other resources that teachers can use. Open courseware. We have, of course, massive open online courses, MOOCs. We also have things called MOOCs and Spooks and I'm grateful to colleagues at Intef in Spain for that. MOOCs are nano open online courses and Spooks are self- paced open online courses. So different sorts of courses available. There are, of course, commercial platforms available, such as LinkedIn Learning and have not to mention things like YouTube, which are full of teaching aids and learning advice of very variable quality, which is a point I'll come back to later. Mobile learning has become increasingly important as well and I guess at the leading edge of these forms of digital learning we have simulations of mental reality, virtual reality, AI learning analytics and of course a digital assessment and credentials is also important and has come to the fore particularly under COVID-19. So that's the state of the art but another important question is is how did we get here? I've tried to capture some of the main developments on this slide and it's important to say with respect to this slide that although I've tried to divide it into decades to sort of rather simplify the story, over time we see technologies replacing one another or the same technology taking steps forward before being superseded. So for example in the 2000s CD-ROMs and DVDs have increasing storage capacity and we're integrated into PCs having been in use well before that. The interesting thing is that much of the older tech of course gets killed off by other subsequent developments so TV, videotapes and cassettes still in use in some cases but DVDs killed off videotapes in the early 2000s and interactive whiteboards similarly replace many combinations of DVD and TV and one of the striking things here I think is that some of the tech and the ideas have been around for some time interactive whiteboards for 30 years open courseway concept 20 years interestingly one of the first educational apps in Google app marketplace was called Grocket and that was in 2010 so it's a quite some time and an interesting question is well had the rate of adoption in slow or fast in the UK it took until 2007 for 98% of secondary schools to have an interactive whiteboard and this is again something I'll come back to you later on. So what's new now we've got this this overall trajectory well I think in the last 10 to 15 years we've seen a real decoupling of teaching and learning from time and place and also massive increase in the ability to offer learners new and different experiences and provide faster more tailored feedback that is of course in potential but it doesn't mean this all this doesn't necessarily mean that new tech is being used for new purposes for innovation and I think if we're going to talk about digitalization innovation it's always important to try and define our terms so here I'm trying to be quite bold and offer a definition and this again is another difficult area it's quite hard to pin down digitalization and it's also difficult to pin down what we mean by innovation but one way of looking at it is the innovations the use of new or significantly redesigned teaching and learning tools methods or environments or new organizational methods which I think is quite important to stress I'm just improving the quality of that and supporting innovation for environmental sustainability economic and social goals and an important question is how common innovation of this sort is and it's hard it's hard to know in reality but I was looking at the OECD's first international survey of teachers teaching and learning TALIS and it found that just over one quarter of teachers believe more innovation in their teaching would be valued in their schools so this isn't putting anything at the feet of teachers it's actually a systemic issue this was asked whether teachers thought their schools would value innovation and interesting only a quarter did which is an interesting finding along with defining digitalization innovation we also need to look at the relationship between the two concepts and it's important to stress that digitalization doesn't always lead to innovation innovation doesn't necessarily rely on digitalization but we do have a set of digital technologies and we also have teaching and learning we have a set of pedagogies how do these two come together it's very complicated of course and I should say that these pedagogies are in a way constructions they represent clusters of teaching and learning methods and this this list is taken from an OECD publication called teachers as designers of learning environments I think these are useful because they give us something to hold on to because this can be quite a slippery topic we'll be talking about pedagogies especially in terms of innovation and relationship to digital technologies I should also point out on this list something is missing which is important in the digital domain which is social or collaborative learning but I'll return to that so those are the digital technologies those are the pedagogies what more can we say about this well in terms of where tech meets teaching in vets experiential learning is actually what that is all about I think there's a lot of potential for digital technologies to enhance the type and scale of experiential learning in vets to take one example video making this is perhaps not using the latest tech but actually the ETF has done some work on this the European Training Foundation which is very interesting we can also talk about blended learning this mixture of conventional class from teaching and digital learning an important question for vet is how we might use blended learning in situations where we have two learning environments classroom in the workplace much talk is made of of game-based learning I think there's a good fit with important aspects of vets interestingly it's popular in work in in work training for adults which is in contrast to many other forms of tech which might be used mainly in general school-based education game-based learning is also good for transversal skills it's important to stress we're not talking necessarily about games per se we're having game gaming elements and there's a very good example could be our husta from the Netherlands from Flanders fact which is well worth looking at I mentioned social collaborative learning and there's numerous possibilities to capitalize on on this through you know one of the key strengths of the internet having numerous platforms and I think it's also linked to gaming which is often a collaborative activity I mentioned assessment earlier tech there's potential for portfolios for example to widen the evidence for assessment and you can also speed up the way in which feedback is given to learners sim spray is a virtual reality simulation for spray painting and it can give very quick feedback about the depth of paint and things of that sort which which then teachers can use to can interpret for their students and importantly we can also have digital learning digital technology that improves the links between assessors and learners and there's an example funded by the EU which called the trial log app which is a trial log because it connects learners and teachers and trainers within companies there are also platforms that link schools and workplace and one of those is the realto platform and it doesn't just connect schools and workplaces but it improves coordination of knowledge acquisition in schools mainly and practical learning mainly in the workplace I think it's worth saying as I do at the bottom here that Covid-19 has revealed the extent to which that lacks the digital tools in relation to practical work-based elements we have things like simulations that are increasingly used but often they involve some sort of sort of kit that people need and that's that is not obviously available at home so it's a major challenge what about the effects of digitalization well I did a slide on this but to be honest there is a lack of evidence about the effects and we need more of that we need more research into what the impacts are on individual learners and on vet provision it can widen access it can be very appealing to those learners who I mentioned right at the beginning who may become from challenging socioeconomic backgrounds who want different ways of learning but Covid-19 has shown the extent to which there are inequalities in access to digital technologies and digital skills and so an unintended consequence of reliance on digitalization if we're not careful maybe increase increasing inequality having said which I think there is a lot of anecdotal evidence about how digital technology changes how learners learn the range in its reach this application and so on and it has positive effects and motivation and cognition it's also got consequences in terms of efficiency and effectiveness cost and benefits often favor digital technologies very much in the classroom so those are some of the ways in which digital learning actually having effects within vocational education and training there are also a whole range of pros and cons of digitalization and they won't dwell on these you can maybe look at these afterwards because there's a lot of positives and there are also a lot of challenges and some of which I've mentioned already so one of the important questions are are we doing enough and I think this graph is quite interesting and the uptake in relation to the uptake of technologies the evidence is scarce and we have seen a general increase in participation in online learning doubling from 2007 to 2015 this is through a Eurostat survey this is not specifically in vocational training this is a general background picture we do have from the Netherlands in 2015 a particular study of vocational education and training and that showed that more than 50% of vet institutions were using most technologies at least some of the time but only a more limited group was used regularly digital text files blogs printed text files less commonly used were tests simulations interactive websites ebooks and games were used as you can see very rarely so an important question is do we need to move beyond text files and movies to more advanced applications that have the potential to transform learners experiences and support pedagogical innovations there are therefore maybe two aspects to improve the rate of take up it's been reported that the speech of digitalization in education is up to five times slower than in other sectors it could be because of poorly distributed knowledge and weak connectivity between stakeholders teachers trainers school leaders policymakers weak flows of information around all those stakeholders another aspect to improve is the depth of the effect the impact of digitalization depends it seems to me on the inherent features of the technology and also how teachers want to use it as well as the pedagogical context and work-based learning is comparatively under provided for by digital technology as I've mentioned already reasons may include cost tradition of relying on company equipment trainers aren't pedagogues so blended learning or gaming elements might be a challenge information is also key interestingly there was a school education gateway survey that shows that teachers are most pleasantly surprised when they use online learning by its potential for innovation flexibility breadth of tools and accessibility so those are all clearly strengths from digitalization so we have a set of challenges teachers and trainers need to be able to see when the benefits of adoption outweigh the risks change involves a risk for we all have that experience and change will only happen when people can understand fully the nature of the risks and also the benefits these links between digital digital technology and pedagogies are not always clear more advanced tech needs more time commitment and resources so in all this information knowledge and skills are key so that teachers and trainers school leaders policy makers for that matter can navigate the huge range of products available and they can know how to use them to full effect we also critically need to include the learners who are a source of latent demand we need to embrace the world of learners especially young learners we've got quite an old teaching population in many countries but we all know now go online to get anything we need and it's interesting if we look at some recent figures on online learning which is here shown on the x-axis against two variables against households having access to a computer and individuals with basic or above basic digital skills these show that actually access to computer is important so digital skills but in fact perhaps digital skills are now more important than others so what can we do about it through all my thinking I think this quote cut through it this is from a colleague of mine or working on an Erasmus plus project and she said in an email to me maybe the most important thing is to train or company teachers and trainers to know how when and what for to use digital tools to make training more attractive to allow pedagogical differentiation these pedagogies are not distrete they overlap and to allow for an efficiency because they'll be able to develop material anyway adapted to their needs so we need to arm teachers and trainers with knowledge and skills you've seen these challenges before here are some of the solutions that we could possibly look at training and networks for teachers and trainers digital skills development in the population better connectivity we might have seen all these type of things before but actually some new angles are that teachers and trainers need initial teacher training and CPD to build knowledge and also to drive demand for e-learning and to be able to make informed choices and the strategies and funding need to be comprehensive and coherent they need to there's need to be a systematic element within these a sort of holistic approach we've seen with COVID-19 that companies and schools that already had e-learning as a systemic element were much better able to respond to the crisis two other things are in these solutions that I don't think that give them enough attention haven't so far one of these is intermediation this is a term in financial services which involves matching lenders and borrowers by a third party and we need more structures and organizations and bodies in place that can actually do the research on digital technologies and on pedagogies and provide teachers and trainers with that knowledge and understanding for them to make the right decisions about what will work best for their learners we also in terms of strategies need to know what the goal is what the purpose of strategies and funding is it's hard to know what makes for effective teaching as we know and therefore if you're talking about innovations and how these might improve teaching and learning that's a further challenge and maybe it's not enough to pursue high quality perhaps we need to pursue excellence as well and my last sort of substantive slide here before my conclusions is related to a new EU initiative on centers of vocational excellence which you can find out about on the European Commission website I've actually put this this sort of doughnuts diagram together because it captures really where digitalization and innovation sits and where teaching and learning sits within this concept of vocational excellence that the European Commission is now taking forward in funding you can see it sits right in the middle of the concept of vocational excellence and it supports many other things the development of high level vet programs bringing initial vocational training and continuing vocational training together and also supporting innovation and business startups within the wider community it's not just about vet being responsive but it's also about vet being proactive and contributing to wider social and economic developments so in conclusion what can we say if we go back to the diagram I used at the beginning of provision employers and learners I hopefully I've shown that digitalization has the potential to for provision improve communication between workplace and school there are platforms that enable teachers and trainers to communicate there are technologies that provide new and different learning experiences for sure and can support in a change in innovation in pedagogy for learners there are solutions for adults to upskill and reskill this decoupling of time and place in learning is is is critical and there are opportunities to re-engage people turned off by traditional education as well and for employers and skills I think there's there's ample evidence that digital technologies can meet the demand for digital skills and also for softer transversal skills through things like gaming which develops team skills and so on so that's that's all from me I hope I managed to condense a very big topic down into something that's digestible in a short period of time back to you Inna thanks a lot Andrew I think it was very insightful we will directly move to the next presentation Monica are you here if you're ready perfect I can already see okay Monica if you can turn on your microphone the presentation is here yes I can hear you sorry I turned on the camera but it's not well displayed in any case I will talk thanks a lot to School Education Gateway for inviting me to talk to this webinar and thanks everybody it's a wide audience here today thanks also to Andrew because it was really an insightful presentation and I work in an online university so some of the insights were really shareable with us as well so I will start with my presentation so as I'm Monica Fasciani and I'm a senior project manager in the research and development area of Marconi University in Rome I'm going to talk about another aspect in the bed sector which is the on-the-job experience based on mobility transmission and mobility and I'm going to introduce a little bit our university first of all it's Guillermo Marconi University which is the first online university recognized by the Italian Ministry of Education in 2004 and you can see from the slide some data which we have six faculties and we have also Italian and international educational and research structures with six departments and our faculties are based in in Rome we have also office and department in other areas as for the for my office we work in the research and development area so we have many line of actions and we the core focus is European funded projects and we do projects of course on research with Horizon 2020 and we do also different projects with the Erasmus Plus program to undertake initiatives that constitute strategic lines of development for the university both at national and international level we do also some networking work in collaborating companies and stakeholders and some consultancy work in the field of European funding and project cycle management so we have also a strength for working with schools so we had many funded projects under the life long learning program and with Europe paid as well for the Erasmus Plus program we had a key action three projects social inclusion in education and training and the name was boosting global citizenship education using digital storytelling and we finalized last year two strategic partnerships project in the field of VET one was Discover Project developing innovative science outreach for vocational education to encourage some careers and the other one was the EVET project online vocational education and training platform which I'm going to present today sorry for the I'm reading the the chat and yes with the video but it's the problem of my computer I'm at home and it's a very big visualization with the camera so maybe you see just my my head okay so I'm going to present EVET as I told you and this is a project funded by the Turkish national agency the applicant was the governorship of of Istanbul which manages the relations with the schools in the district of Istanbul and the name is online vocational education and training platform because we wanted to create platform for VET providers who could communicate collaborate and create mobility projects under the Erasmus class umbrella program the participating countries were Turkey, Italy and and Germany and we had two more partners in in Turkey of Takoye which was VET school and Bogazici university a German partner and our university so this is our team just to show the people who participated in the project and so why the applicant decided to implement such a project because they thought it was a good way to try to put together schools and companies and try to match directly the requirements and needs of both entities in terms of creating relations for Transnational Mobility the objective was to create and reinforce synergies between formal and informal educational sectors as well as the labor market and to set up a favouring environment for work-based learning mobility as a complementary educational path in order to boost employability of young people we know also from the reports from CityFop regarding the policies and practices of work-based learning that improved cooperation between educational institutions and labor market actors is needed in order to open up also schools to the to the world of work so how do did we want to create this synergy we choose to create it exploiting the potential of mobility projects within the Rasmus Plus programme we know that mobility is expected to enhance cooperation among the member states and promote the European dimensions dimension also in the field of education and it can create stronger cohesion in Europe and preparing the workforce for the European job market enhancing also their intercultural education therefore as as I read it's not seen just a simple movement that as a way to think as a European citizen and the Rasmus Plus programme in this regard had ambitious aims because it wanted to help students to become internationally competent and well prepared for job requirements and in this interrelated European economy and of course it should have an impact a positive impact on the personal development of the students and in particular on intercultural understanding and foreign language proficiency but also in their develop in their career development so I saw from the the pre-serve that most of you work in schools that support the opportunities to initiating that mobility activity so my question to you you can reply in the chat is if you were involved activity in the mobility projects yourself or with your students so I see okay great I see positive answers okay great so I'm going to to tell you how we built our project and what was our idea and also the scope the intention and what what were the results actually we we reached and I will discuss with you also on the tools that we use so based on a confrontation that are mainly our applicants the ownership of Istanbul head with partner schools we realize that the most commonly widespread problems in realizing a mobility projects for school are not let's say a lack or not enough skills in schools and company staff these is related mainly to the English language learning in English English language teaching sorry um knowledge and the knowledge of the program and its rules the cost of consulting firms that can support in realizing this project and also the lack of a shared environmental line for partner search we focused on this third problem the lack of this environment online and therefore that is why realize this project with the aim to create this this platform so my question to you is if these are also the problems that you encounter if you encounter any problem in realizing a mobility problem a project in your school I will wait for some replies or maybe there is a problem in finding suitable partners for example I will reply only to Mark who said there are EU platforms for vet mobility in at the moment so we will talk about that later so I will go on with my presentation and say that we we developed this platform based on five phases and analysis design development test and delivery and maintenance yes sorry sorry I just because I'm seeing the chat and I want to reply to some of you yes there is a twinning but it's it's a bit different because here we are talking about a relation between the vet providers and the labor market so putting together these two in order to realize on the job mobility Transnational Mobility okay so I go on and then I will we will see other inputs so the analysis was carried out delivering five questioners to five companies and five schools in each country and we we chose institutions that had already had experience in mobility project and also without this experience the questions were related to their personal experience their willingness to be involved in mobility projects and to use the platform and which features they would have appreciated most in the platform then we we went on with the development phase which was carried out by our partner at Bogazich University they designed the software interface the user guidelines and the platform test at the beginning this is something I can discuss also with you we had the idea to involve schools and companies that already had a peak number in order to to have partners that were already aware of the program of the Rasmus Plus program and of mobility projects as well we did a testing phase involving six entities in each participating country and the results were some strengths and weaknesses that were highlighted fortunately let's say that the strengths were related to the meaning of the project which was to create a tool that was useful to make contacts with among transnational partners it was good for mobility projects and you can find relevant partners and offers meaningful for what you're looking for and it's easy to use among the cons there are the full potential is not clear so some procedures maybe were not very detailed and there was a missing area for direct communication a forum and it was difficult to access using the peak and also some things related to the graphical appeal of the of the platform so this is the last one I wanted to show you the platform but I cannot exit the the presentation so I will show you just a few pictures about it but I want to share with you in the chat okay but maybe yes they already shared the link of of the portal so I want to show you just some features for example what we did based on the test results where some changes related to the cons that we had identified and and we put we improved the user guide and the fact in order to speed up the procedures and the processes and describe them step by step to either to make them exploit the platform in its full potential and we translated it in many different languages mainly the languages of the partnership and we put some features like the advanced search and the list and the list of trainings after this as I told you I was I mentioned the peak thing it was very difficult for example in Italy and in Germany we couldn't find many companies that had the peak number and and yes it's different but the project is closed and before we use the peak number and basically many companies do not have it and the problem is that when they have it it's linked to the email or phone of high management people therefore they were reluctant to use it in the platform we created two different accesses one institutional using the peak and the password and the other one individual using the email and and the the password so that we could provide also the teachers the possibilities to get in and then to talk with the schools and have an institutional an institutional approval then this is the interface when you get into the platform so you have an area with the trainings to create your offer to manage your trainings and you have also in a session where you can manage the the agreements for rating also the the platform to edit your profile and you have different different features this this is the interface that you see in the list of trainings you can see the title and and the description of the training the date range also the the qualification level that is required and the language of interaction and you see small parts of plugs which will be the place where the where the training will take will take place these are some data on the use of the platform in the the last month in May so you can see that there are no huge numbers and mainly are from Turkey Belgium and Italy which are the countries that participated in in the the project because our German partners was linked also to the Netherlands and Belgium they had contacts there with with schools so what next we would like to improve this platform to improve a place where these experiences can be shared and where contacts can be created for for traditional mobility so my last question to you is if you believe that the platform like this can be useful for that the transnational mobility and for improving a part the complementary pathway of work-based learning we are while you reply I tell you that we are of course aware of the importance of an integrated pathway of work-based learning in a transnational perspective and also of the importance of cooperation with other stakeholders in work-based learning and of course if the difference in vet systems in Europe is a value we need also to create a quality guarantee that can itself create reciprocal trust that can enhance mobility and also the recognition of knowledges and competencies among the different systems okay okay thanks that's that's nice to see that you find it useful so this is my presentation the presentation of our project I think we will have some time to to to have some questions and answers thanks for your attention thanks a lot Monica I think it was really great and I saw a lot of positive feedback regarding the platform thanks a lot was really useful so we have also the third speaker but right now I believe that she experienced some technical issues to connect so I think that we can also spend this time to ask and answer the questions so we'll give a couple of minutes if you have any questions to type it in the chat please do so now so we can address it to our speakers okay Monique I believe that this question from Mark is for you he asked if a company can register who was checking if an actual training can take place at the moment all the the control is in the hand of the Bogazici University they monitor all the steps and the procedures in the in the platform so they monitor if the the offers are then concluded if there is an interaction if there is a contact everything and I want to reply to another question by Mark which was the feedback from the company actually as I said in Italy and in Germany we had some problems involving the companies therefore when I said also about the integrated action I meant also campaigning to engage host companies and to make them interact in the platform in order to have more possibilities of realizing these transmission mobility projects yeah sure I just picking up a comment from earlier if that's helpful hi again everybody this was a comment I saw earlier that we said we become tech slaves and yeah I couldn't agree more about that I think we've all become tech slaves at the moment and I think we have to learn ways to to work around it as well I went for a 45 minute walk before this webinar just to clear my head and to get myself away from the tech I guess the advantage of tech is also is that it's also full of examples of how not to use it if you look on the internet so I just thought I'd put that in as a tip Thanks a lot Andrew I think during your presentation there was also another question which sounded like how can we deal with the problem that the practical lessons are that that is that's a really big issue it comes up in all the discussions and webinars that we've been in it's an enormous problem for that at the moment that the technology hasn't been implemented and used I was looking the other day at a really good simulation for welding it's augmented reality so that means of course you need to have some some kit some pieces of equipment that you use so you use it in a workplace and it's a substitute for doing real welding because it's more cost effective you can do get in more practice sessions you don't have to worry about preparation and then cleaning up afterwards but it's obviously you can't use that at home unless you send people this remote learning equipment and of course that has been possible for in some sectors and we we've seen how news companies have got around this by sending high quality cameras and recording equipment and microphones to people in their homes but that's a level of funding that has been sadly lacking in in vocational education training in most countries thanks a lot Andrew we also have a question do you think that digital tools can substitute actual internship substitute for our internship so I am I guess they I guess they could yes I think I think already people are thinking about how to do a larger proportion of their courses at at home rather than having to go somewhere but it's interesting to think about a virtual a transnational mobility in this context moving between countries I was doing some work recently on using the EC Vet principles and and how to and thinking about also quality and mobility and longer duration mobility which is a bit of a subject that's not very current because everyone's at home but hopefully at some point transnational mobility will become come back into come back into place and the the the issue there is the actually the the lack of use of digital assessment tools to to assess people it's interesting I mentioned the the rate of take up and there's a whole set of obstacles and barriers that seem to have been inhibitors to people taking up and using technology those timelines I showed when you put those together it's quite remarkable that the technology's been here for quite a long time but for a whole set of reasons hasn't been taken up as I've mentioned already I think one of those reasons has been funding but now hopefully it's become clear to everybody the value of that funding in the future another question we have also for both speakers is what can STEM education learn from that again I'm not sure if Monica wants to say anything about that but that's it it's a that's a good question I'm not sure I directly know the answer to that I think I think it might have something to do with the practical experience side of things a few years ago I worked in the UK on a new program that had been introduced by the government and it was giving engineering experience to young people from the age of 16 in schools because in fact they the problem that universities were reporting was that people at 18 who went into universities didn't have enough experience of actually doing engineering things in in workshops that too many of their students can come from mathematics backgrounds and actually they didn't have the hands on practical experience so I think there are there are some lessons there from the work-based learning side of things that could feed into to STEM and it can go both ways as well computational learning is mentioned in the OECD study that I mentioned earlier and I think there's there's potential there for work-based learning and VET to think more about how it can use and develop STEM within its own programs sorry Fabi just a few words I agree with what Andrew was saying and I wanted to I mentioned another project before event which was called Discover and in that project we tried to make a co-creation process between universities and VET the VET sector for materials for fine outreach and let's say trying to to feel a little bit these gaps that you were mentioning between the two these two environments I see a comment as well regarding the point of Erasmus Plus and other transnational mobility programs to be to develop cultural aspects yeah I couldn't agree more and I think I've talked about the economic side of VET but I think we shouldn't forget the other aspects of learning social skills but also civic skills social responsibility skills and that type of thing absolutely this is let's say the most important part you know because basically you can do the on-the-job experience also in your in your country transnational mobility is something different that maybe adds something more to to to to to to to develop beyond the job experience which is really the meaning to the intercultural competencies I think one of the problems personally is that it's not possible to have full recognition and validation of those other skills because the focus is on on technical skills very often not always but very often and it is those experiences are provided for people because they can have a sort of holistic kind of experience but they don't get any recognition for those extra skills I think we've got to think of new ways in which people can have received some sort of credit for those because it's true that these skills are not valued they are not given the right value at the moment thanks a lot for both of our speakers