Abstract:

Background:
The scope of optometry practice has a large range of variability around the world. Even in Europe, important differences can be found between countries, thus the training optometrists receive may also be disparate. To harmonize optometry education, the European Council of Optometry and Optics (ECOO) introduced the European Optometry Diploma (EOD) in 2000, as a gold standard curriculum.

Aims:
The main aim of the project is to guide Higher Education Institutions (HEI) from India and Israel to obtain EOD accreditation.

There are several benefits of this main objective, as
• To provide the optometry trainers with some new skills and pedagogical materials that would be useful to gain the EOD.
• To improve the training of optometrists in the European HEIs, as an outcome of the positive effects of sharing best practices with other institutions.

Method:
Four HEI from Europe, two from Israel and three from India received an ERASMUS+ programme grant to work on the present project. The European HEI were selected to have a good representation of the different situations: The City University London, UK, because of very high standard of training and their experience in evidence based practice, The University College of Southeast Norway and the University of Applied Sciences (Utrecht, Holland), for having already finished the EOD accreditation process and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, for being a prestigious School in the south of Europe that is willing to become accredited. The Israel colleges (Hadassah College and Bar Ilan University) were selected because the scope of practice in Israel is similar to the one in some European countries. The Indian partners were selected because they wanted to improve the training of their students and valued the EOD standard.
Work in progress
The project is divided into 5 work packages: benchmarking the optometric programs (WP1), developing and piloting pedagogic resources (WP2), following a quality plan (WP3), disseminating the project outputs (WP4) and management (WP5).
The kick off meeting was held in November, 2016, the first steps of WP1 and WP2 and several dissemination actions have been accomplished. The first step was the gap analysis, EOD competencies that are not worked on in the curriculum. The second step was an overlapping analysis, competencies that are taught more than once throughout the curriculum. From that, a Pedagogical Transformation Plan (PTP) was written for each institution. The PTP contains a training proposal for the faculty members of the Israel and India institutions, which consists of training sessions organized in the institutions and on-line courses. The training phase is planned to be completed during the first semester of 2018.

Conclusions:
The project is proceeding according to the programmed agenda.
The working plan is resulting in a good environment to promote teaching experience interchange among the participants.
Faculty mobility as part of the training the trainers sessions provide an excellent opportunity to visit other institutions and compare the teaching methods and strategies.

The whole Oculus Consortium is a contributor to this communicatiion
References:
[1] http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/projects/eplus-project-details/#project/d59ee9a8-e863-4b77-be30-f9535323ee13

Keywords:

Higher Education Institutions, European Optometry Diploma, Pedagogical Transformation Plan, Curriculum harmonisation.