Abstract:

According to the innovation of the learning and teaching methodologies in the VET (Vocational Education and Training), our starting point was that the traditional curricular structures couldn’t follow the accelerated market and technological changes. Regarding the VET textbooks and teaching methods, as our survey found there is a massive deficit in learning materials. As our basíc analysis stated (Benedek-Molnar, 2017) about forty-five per cent of the existing VET materials do not meet the requirement of being up-to-date. Changing the shortage of current VET contents our concept forwards to develop the teachers’ attitude for the local content development and implement the micro-content based teaching methods in the teaching practice.

The lecture frames the first two year experiences of the OCD model developed in the teachers’ training. One of these initiations was the subject pedagogical research program prepared by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences between 2015 and 2017 that incorporated our project dealing with the development of VET methodology in 2016. Since 2017, we established a network of 12 schools where teachers and students implement content development activities.

The theoretical background of our research is connected to the analysis of the frameworks of which were set by our research community at several fora (ECER VETNET, EDULEARN, INTED) along with our international activities aimed at renewing vocational didactics (Benedek, 2017; Molnar, 2018). Although the national VET systems differ in many aspects, the development of the new technologies and the spread of interactive and collaborative learning environment have brought about a general intention to launch action researches with innovation objectives.

The essence of our OCD (Open Content Development) model, which has been proved by our first development results, is that in the development of vocational content, the partnership that is much more open than traditional content development processes could establish between the teachers and the students. For all this, the online learning environment and interactive communication offer a favourable development environment where the partners’ activeness and so their development attitudes can mutually be improved.

The overall didactical environment of our OCD model offered new opportunity to integrate essential elements appearing as results in terms of the sustainability and the dissemination of the model. Thus, for example, new methodological modules were introduced and tested in the teachers’ training and further training. The adoption of learning framework systems with VET objectives has become general, which has established up-to-date possibilities in the field of online collaborative learning, and the creation of cloud technologies intended to provide infrastructural support for content development and to help the broad range application of micro-content (Benedek-Horváth, 2016) with an open-access attitude has also brought about promising results.

The development is openness for teachers and pupils, as well, therefore during the research, surveys examining the teachers’ and students’ attitudes have been done. We also analyse the new knowledge elements created during the modernization of the contents and also elaborate a series of methodological proposals that warrant the sustainability of the OCD model. The development program initiated at pilot schools is currently stepping towards general practice.

Keywords:

Learning and teaching methodologies, Open Content Development, teachers’training, Vocational Education.