ADAPTING AND TRANSLATING UK ELEARNING VOCATIONAL RESOURCES FOR USE IN EASTERN EUROPEAN STATES

Hair.net, Hairdressing advice (&) Internet Resources (for) National (&) European Training, is a project funded by the European Union Lifelong Learning Programme, under the Leonardo De Vinci Transfer of Innovation programme. It is a 2 year project which began on 1st October 2010 and completes on 1st October 2012. The UK Hairdressing training service is an award winning service, funded by Joint Information Systems Committee that has been providing UK hairdressers with much needed innovative online resources for almost 10 years. A highly successful and respected service in the UK the potential was there to reuse these resources to create similar, much needed services in Eastern Europe. The project is an ambitious programme of activity which takes the UK resources and translates and adapts them for the Eastern European market, namely, Romania, Slovakia and Bulgaria. This presentation will illustrate the activity involved in translating and adapting videos, images and text files into high quality resources designed to fulfil the needs of the Eastern European market. We will share the methods and findings of the full research needs analysis which has been carried out in all three states and show how the results of this shaped and informed the project. We will also explore how we mapped the resources to the European Qualifications Framework, (EQF). The EQF is a common European Reference Framework which enables European Countries to link their qualification framework to each other. This, we believe, adds value and status to online resources by allowing the user to work towards European wide recognised qualification. The presentation will also discuss how the project has tested these e learning resources across 3 European states; the testing methods that we used, the results from the testing and how these results were interpreted to refine the final products. We will relay the technical issues and problems the project encountered in translating, adapting and hosting the final product online. This includes a discussion about the production of the specification for the technical platform we used; a complex requirements package for facilitating the adapting and translating of materials and eventually hosting the finished services. The presentation will highlight the positives and negatives in respect of working in a transnational partnership and discuss, with evidence, how the project has been received in Eastern Europe and the impact that it has had on the vocational sector. This presentation will serve as a case study for others who are considering reusing elearning resources globally. We will highlight the negatives and the positives, we’ll be candid, and talk about what we would have differently and what worked really well. With European strategy increasingly focused on sharing and learning across EU states and with an increased budget for Lifelong Learning Projects that repurpose material rather than create it, this is an essential presentation for anyone considering adapting elearning resources for a new audience.