Year 2008

Project Type Development of Innovation

Status granted

Country EU-Centralised Projects

Marketing Text The competitiveness in European enterprises is conditional on the presence of innovation, flexibility, competence, and highly qualified people. Particularly in the field of production engineering, a continuous company success in international business is only guaranteed when a continuous enhancement in knowledge and competence in connection with further education and advance training of people is realised. The competence is particularly affected by rapidly changing technologies, the increasing degree of multidisciplinarity, and absence of skilled labour.
Therefore, lifelong learning and the ability to work in an interdisciplinary and multicultural environment are the core elements of future competency and will be supported and improved by this project.
The aim of this project is to develop a prototype for an e-learning environment for further education and skill improvement in the area of manufacturing technology supporting self-directed and distance learning. Complex and adequately structured learning fields will be connected to several remote experimentation set-ups, which are effective tools in exploratory learning. The project favours an innovative concept of learning and competence development in the field of manufacturing technology using telemetric experimentation, taking care of dissemination of specialised knowledge combined with cooperative learning and learning in communities.
The target groups of this project include workers and students who are directly engaged in production technology as well as people who have different backgrounds but are indirectly related to production technology, i.e. mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, IT specialists etc.
The impact of this project is improving conditions for lifelong learning, acquiring specialised knowledge in manufacturing technology from different European institutions, increasing convergence, opening the educational programme for different groups from industry and academia, facilitating multicultural exchange, increasing virtual mobility and new flexible forms of access to knowledge, and enhancing the communication and cooperation competencies.

Summary The outcome of this project is a prototype of an e-learning environment based on a Learning Management System (LMS) such as Moodle (Moodle - http://moodle.org/ is a multi-lingual, internationally spread open source LMS). Integrated are especially environments for remote experiments (pilot telemetric experiments at the European level organised in the participating countries) and elements to support communication by means of Computer-Supported-Cooperative-Learning (CSCL) and Computer-Supported-Cooperative-Working (CSCW). In the e-learning environment the production technology is represented by the fields forming, cutting, and joining. For these most important fields of manufacturing technology contents of presentations, teaching material and laboratory exercises considering the latest didactical strategies and technical solutions, using e.g. process animations and video sequences, will be produced by the project partners according to their fields of competence. This will be didactically organised as the knowledge base of the environment. To support a broad range of users with different learning strategies and of different technical background in manufacturing technology the knowledge is framed by e-moderation and virtual coaching as well as e-tutoring to support self-directed learning and allow the tele-learning approach. The communication among the users is enriched by the offer of learning communities.
Beside the development of the final prototype the cognitions and results of the projects are documented in three intermediate reports (evaluated concept of e-learning platform, concept e-learning platform with telemetric experiments integrated, evaluation of prototype of e-learning platform with telemetric experiments integrated) and the final report. The evaluation of the concept and the prototype of the e-learning environment are performed by internal and public evaluation tests. Part of the evaluation is two events in which users and especially experts get the possibility to explore and discuss the concept and the prototype of the e-learning environment.

Description In order to ensure the optimum utilisation of available resources in developing the prototype of skill improvement platform, tasks will be divided among the consortium’s partners. The didactical aspects of the learning and its implementation will be taken care by HDZ, while the rest of the three institutes will be focusing on developing the course contents under the pedagogical guidelines. The project will start with the precise identification of target groups and formulation of their needs in terms of production technology. This will be followed by modelling of learning environment and specification of course contents. Afterwards, a first seminar in Germany focussing on didactics will be organised where these modelled learning environment and contents will be analysed and discussed by relevant experts. With the incorporation of feedback, the modelling will be completed and the didactical treatment of course content will be started. The remote experimentation will be didactically and interface oriented attached with learning environment and the instruments will be correspondly upgraded. The didactically prepared training modules will be placed and integrated in e-learning environment. Subsequently, the e-learning environment will be accessible internally and externally to the public and their experiences with this opportunity will be shared out and discussed by organising a second seminar in each country focussing on the users of the platform. Based on their feedbacks necessary modifications in learning environment will be preformed. In order to ensure the sustainability and future utilisation of e-learning, the industrial partners will be looked after who could contribute in further development of the prototype and its conversion to a product. Additionally, industrial target groups will be searched out who could integrate this learning opportunity into their in house skill development programmes.

Themes     Equal opportunities
    Initial training
    Intercultural learning
    Sustainability
    Lifelong learning
    Higher education
    Open and distance learning
    Continuous training

Sectors     Education
    Professional, Scientific and Technical Activities

Product Types open and distance learning
others
teaching material
modules
material for open learning
evaluation methods

Product information During the project an e-learning platform with integrated telemetric experimentation for the purpose of interaction will be developed.

Projecthomepage http://www.iul.eu/petex/