Covid19 poses major challenges for educational institutions around the world. Learning benefits from knowledge exchange, interaction and meeting each other.
Last March, the possibilities for face to face interaction in education changed drastically. For Aeres University of Applied Sciences in Wageningen, the teacher training centre for land-based education, the ultimate chance to design and develop online and blended didactics. A practice-oriented study and inventory in the entire team of the university of applied sciences resulted in a didactic approach: ‘SOOS’, a Dutch abbreviation for ‘together online on the move’. A model that allows teachers and trainers to redesign learning-situations in an online or blended environment.
An integrated form of educational design, in which knowledge creation, processing, learning activities, collaboration, exchange and interaction need each other and in which conscious choices are made for the use of online tools and ‘flipping the classroom’. An approach in which online and physical learning reinforce each other. It is a didactic approach that helps to give educational shape to this period, but from which we will undoubtedly also keep something after Covid19. And according to the principle ‘teach as you preach‘, Aeres also aims to inspire its students to apply this didactics in the vocational schools where they practice their teaching skills.
Jan-Willem Noom, lecturer in professional didactics and landscape design
Acknowledgements: many thanks to EUROPEA-Netherlands and Jan (NL) 🙂
Pictures: Aeres UAS & Jan-Willem Noom 🙂
