The need and necessity for lifelong and life-wide learning is still present in our society, more than ever before, because of the constant changes in both people's private and professional lives.
The exodus of baby boomers poses major problems for companies; it is this generation in particular that holds specialist positions in companies today, and colleagues who are also active are unable to take time off to gain further training. The search for a balance between family, work and lifelong learning is more challenging than ever. The increasing demand for blended and online learning is part of the transition to the life, learning and work of the future. Over the past decades, teachers have built up a great deal of expertise in creating and supporting/tutoring professional learning communities within the four walls of the classroom.
The change in the adult learner's way of learning is forcing teachers to adapt their way of teaching. More and more, the adult learner wants tailor-made lifelong and lifewide (co-)learning independent of place and time. An answer to this changing need and 'new' way of learning can partly be provided by using the possibilities of the 'new' technologies.
Following the implementation of a previous KA1 ERASMUS-plus project titled Towards a new future-oriented pedagogical approach for adult education (Project Code 2019-1-BE02-KA104-060011) based on an OECD publication Teachers as designers of learning environments, a European tender was organised by Catholic Education Flanders in which we, together with our centres for adult education, looked for a learning management system to facilitate this 'new' form of learning. But a new form of learning also requires a new form of teaching.
The aim of this project is to learn with and from each other how best to facilitate such transition processes ...
One of the many challenges today is to also create and support professional learning communities in a blended environment or in a complete online environment. The implementation of such a learning management system not only involves substantive challenges, but also many practical and organisational challenges. The aim of this project is to learn with and from each other how best to facilitate such transition processes, how to create, guide and support online learning communities, what the differences are between the known didactics and the e-didactics, which in many cases strongly deviate from the familiar general and more specific professional didactics.
By following a few courses, we want to investigate the differences between the known didactics and the 'new' e-didactics, between working in real life with a professional learning community in a classroom context and working with a professional online learning community in a virtual context. We look at how we can support and coach our employees in our own organizations to make this transition a reality and see with our students how they experience this.
