Planned project period 2020-2022

Main objective: Strengthening the cooperation between 5 partners’ institutions and increasing their internationalization through working out and disseminating new educational tools and exchange of good practices in distance learning.

The specific objectives:

– Promotion of the idea of the use of ICTs and open educational resources in education at the higher education level.

– Equipping academic teachers from 5 partner universities with modern didactic tools for students.

– Improving the knowledge of new technologies and interactive tools as educational means.

– Stimulating virtual forms of collaboration and communication.

Project leader: University of Silesia, Poland

Planned project period: 2020-2022

Partners:

University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic

University of Salerno, Italy

Kazimieras Simonavičius University, Lithuania

University of Presov, Slovakia

Project has been funded with support from the European Commission under the programme Erasmus+.

Results of the project:

1. A report on the use of e-learning in the humanities in the Czech Republic, Italy, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia. The goal of the report is to analyse various solutions which have already been implemented in online teaching. Information was collected on the basis of the relativization of the incorporated tools, i.e., on the one hand, the nature of the courses in which the modules are conducted, and the level or mode of study was researched; on the other hand, interests, age of instructors or the reasons for the emergence of e-learning in a given unit (top-down recommendations or bottom-up initiatives) were analysed.
2. Toolbox in postpandemic didactic practice. Obligatory, long-term online teaching forced by the COVID-19 pandemic has made academic teachers acquire the basic, and in some cases even advanced, methods, techniques and tools that enable this kind of teaching. However, didactics (including its online version) is an extremely complex phenomenon and thus many issues have remained unsolved. The name TOOLBOX was created before the pandemic, when we believed that online teaching was not popular in the field of humanities because teachers were not familiar with appropriate tools. We have kept the name, but nowadays we are convinced that the key to effective online teaching is methodology, not technology. That is why we have focused on materials that show the methodology of online teaching and course planning instead of presenting selected digital tools and applications. We aim at promoting above all the idea of effective online teaching and not simply modern technologies. Our TOOLBOX consists of three sections. The first one, MODULES WITH EXERCISES, contains information on planning courses and single classes in the online mode. The SCENARIOS section contains sample class scenarios/lesson plans that cover different subjects from the field of humanities. The last section, VOICES ON ONLINE TEACHING, contains short videos with opinions, hints, and comments on teaching online with the use of our TOOLBOX.

All materials are available on the website of the project.