Over the course of this 3 year project, we will be running three separate events which are subsidized through the Erasmus+ funding. This subsidy will be offered to attendees.
This multiplier event will showcase the e-Books which have been produced by teacher educators and their students (O3) in a two day conference event which will start the process of bringing together potential adopters and end-users who will be targeted later in the project for feedback and comment on later outputs, hence contributing to the construction of the m-learning network for teacher educators which is one of the objectives of the project. The event will take the form of an interactive workshop/conference with presentations from the schools and universities which constructed the e-Books and opportunities for participants to try out the digital resources which will be available for them to download (still as prototypes) after the event. This will enable the project partners to collect further data from end-users and to evaluate the e-Books in terms of their usability, technical value, etc before they are completed and published. The multiplier event will also be used to test out the first instrument from the mobile learning toolkit (the online survey) and gather feedback about its effectiveness and usefulness from potential end users. Participants will be recruited from across Europe through targeted actions undertaken by each of the project partners in their own country and the coordinator at a pan-European level through various networks and channels.
2nd Multiplier Event / Mini Conference: Bergen 2016
This two day event will be used to showcase the iPAC mobile learning toolkit and to further recruit potential adopters and end-users. The iPAC toolkit will be approaching completion by this point (October 2016) and this will be a final opportunity to collect feedback from end-users in order to refine the toolkit before full-scale dissemination begins later in the year. The event will be organised in such a way as to engage participants who will be able to use all of the instruments which have been developed, providing detailed feedback on their value and usefulness which will feed into the impact assessment for the project.
Main Conference: Hull 2017
This five day short-term joint staff training event will play a critical role in ensuring the project is further embedded in the practice and cultures of the organizing partners helping to modernise the pedagogical practices in teacher education and more widely in Higher Education itself. The event will be hosted in Hull over five days in July 2017 at the end of the project and this will coincide with the city's own celebrations as part of the City of Culture 2017. As such the city council have agreed to incorporate this event as part of the celebrations which will help to raise the profile of the event considerable across the UK and further afield. The event will be timed to coincide with a one day conference on mobile learning in teacher education/Higher Education which will be run in conjunction with various national organisations (e.g. MirandaNet and JISC) and this conference will precede the five day training event, enabling participants to attend both or just one. The short-term joint staff training event will be targeted at potential adopters inside each of the partner organisations (e.g. other teacher educators in each university and other academic staff) with some additional places available for participants from beyond the project partner institutions in order to further broaden the reach and appeal of the project.
The training event will enable participants to develop a wide range of skills and understandings in how to use mobile technologies in teacher education/higher education and will enable the project partners to further test, refine and evaluate all of the project outputs (O1-O3) which have been produced by this point. Therefore the value of this event is to reinforce the other embedding activities which have already taken place during the project ensuring it is sustained in at least all of the project partner institutions and more widely through the m-learning network. The use of technology enhanced learning in higher education and teacher education is a major priority for the University of Hull where there is currently a curriculum reform project due to be introduced in 2016-2017. As part of this process staff from the Faculty of Education are developing an international Masters programme in Digital Education and this five day training programme will be validated as a module in this programme, available annually after the project is completed. As a contribution in kind all participants at this short-term joint staff training event will be given the option of gaining accreditation at level 7 (Masters level) or alternatively level 8 (Doctoral) for their learning undertaken during the event. The training event will be designed to be as interactive as possible with participants encouraged to share ideas, knowledge and experiences. Each workshop session will be run by an experienced facilitator who will be fully prepared and briefed in advance of the event.
Sessions will include a mix of :
formal keynote presentations by external experts, project partners and other speakers recognised as experts in the field*
networking sessions where project partners will mix with new adopters and users to share ideas and opportunities (e.g. speed networking sessions)
practical workshops to use the outputs and to develop new ideas/exemplars
cultural activities to encourage new member into the mobile learning network