Research Project

InDigiTrain: on Digital Media in Professional Training

Friedrichsdorf (GER), August 2016 - InDigiTrain stands for "integrated digital training", viewed as a motor for making the continuing education and training structures of speech therapists and hygiene professionals more flexible. The collaborative project promoted by the Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the European Union’s European Social Fund (ESF) started 01 June 2016. The German company M.I.T is a cooperation partner in the collaborative project, together with the Workers’ Welfare Association (AWO) chapter in Ennepe/Ruhr, and Bildungsinstitut im Gesundheitswesen (BiG - Training Institute for Health Services). The Open University in Hagen is the project coordinator. 

In the three-year project, which runs until May 2019, digital learning showcase scenarios will be developed for the health services industry on the basis of inverted classroom methods and problem-orientated learning. The goal is to modernise the training of speech therapists, as well as the continuing training of caregivers to hygiene professionals in order to enable greater flexibility in regard to time and structure.

"We would like to contribute to an improvement in the quality of the continuing education and training of the respective occupational groups and create a greater relevance to actual working conditions", summarised the project manager, Professor Claudia de Witt. This will include the development of digital media for teaching and learning and its implementation as a permanent component of the qualification structures. Together with the two practice partners AWO and BiG, realistic scenarios will be conceptualised and practically tested in the institutions. The eLearning specialist M.I.T is responsible for the technical development.

The goal of the project is to break up the separation of the work and learning locations of these two occupational groups and to make theoretical knowledge and its practical application more seamless and needs oriented through the deployment of digital media. A central element will be the practical cases, which are as authentic as possible a result of being triggered by work-associated learning processes.
These will be supplemented with the methods of the inverted classroom in which the training rooms will be “exchanged”: the transfer of knowledge moves from the classroom to individual preparation, and the consideration and the deepening of the learning content switches from homework to instruction in the training centres.

This project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the European Social Fund under the support code 01PD15014.