BEQUEL: Benchmarking for Quality Assurance in eLearning provision of VET education (2021-2023) (https://www.bequel.eu/)
The BEQUEL project aims at assisting VET providers in their progress towards effective deployment of eLearning VET programmes and ensuring quality assurance practices in digital education initiatives. The project will include actions that contribute to building eLearning education readiness and to mitigating the impact of the crisis on VET education.
The general objective of the project is to develop quality assurance in eLearning provision and practices of VET educators, in the involved countries, through promotion of selfevaluation, quality benchmarking and networking between VET providers.
OBJECTIVES
- To examine the existing approaches for quality in digital elearning and pedagogies in VET education at European level.
- To develop a quality assurance framework and self-assessment questionnaires for quality assurance in elearning provision for VET organisations.
- To develop a thematic portal on quality assurance in digital transformation with various content, documents, links, articles, videos.
- To develop an on-line benchmarking tool for quality assurance in elearning for VET providers.
- To create a Community of Practice of VET providers across the EU and mobilize it through social media.
BEQUEL project builds up on two previous projects, BEQUAL (Quality assurance in VET), which was expanded by 3 following projects, and BEQUAL. App (Quality assurance in Apprenticeships and WBL). It will use the EU wide validated architecture of the benchmarking tools developed in these projects, with the necessary adaptations.
The new project will use the latest technology and will take into consideration recent developments in elearning education and VET education, after the COVID-19 pandemic.
BEQUEL project is innovative by its nature, since it will concentrate on enhancing high quality elearning provision in VET education, something that has not been examined yet since the pandemic. The quality framework developed and the benchmarking tool will utilise other European frameworks, initiatives and strategies like the Digital Education Action Plan (2018 and 2020) and the ENQA (Quality assurance in Elearning for higher education). BEQUEL will also utilise the DigiCompORg and the SELFIE tool, which concentrate on digital transformations of organisations, while it will concentrate specifically in the pedagogical, administrative, technical and organisational elearning practices of VET providers.
Furthermore, BEQUEL will utilise the notion of benchmarking, which means comparing individual results with practices followed by VET providers in other EU countries and ultimately worldwide. In this way it will allow self reflection and motivate improvement and uptaking of best practices in the post COVID-19 VET elearning landscape.
BEQUEL will also create synergies and promote the taking up of e-learning by VET education, not just for theoretical modules but also for modules that are traditionally taught in workshops (remote labs). The transfer of practical labs/workshops in digital and distance form is one of the biggest challenges VET is currently facing.