design ORGANISATION AND ENVIRONMENT/ María Beunza and Pepa Sánchez de Miguel

The so-called teaching emergency remote response (ERDE) or ERT has been used in times of armed conflict and severe hardship. During the COVID 19 pandemic, it has made it possible to implement training programmes in digital skills for teaching at academic staff, in order to avoid a standstill in the training professional employment (FPE).

With the pandemic, a "Reskilling"project was launched , with more than 120 trainers and experts from training Professional for employment (FPE), which shows us that it is possible to equip academic staff, and consequently its learners, with digital competences using: free digital tools, Project Based Learning (PBL and ABP) methodology ( Spanish), peer-to-peer learning and, monitoring and support staff in individual online tutorials. In a period of no more than two weeks, the academic staff can acquire the digital competences necessary to train, remotely and virtually, groups of students with different backgrounds and starting points, in a wide range of areas of knowledge.

Basic digital skills are acquired relatively easily and quickly, through guided internship to carry out specific projects in which to apply them.

Methodology applied

With regard to the methodology used, although the academic staff that has been trained in the project is mostly integrated in a group dedicated to the FPE, this experience demonstrates:

1. The feasibility of rapidly equipping academic staff of any age and level of skill with digital skills, using accessible and free resources.
2. The usefulness of digital tools, generally developed for formal Education (García-Peñalvo, 2020), in VET.
3. The possibility of establishing training pathways (Meinecke, 2020), which complement the face-to-face training or mitigate its absence, in the face of the social changes we are experiencing.

If the above were to be considered as demonstrated by this reskillingproject , the so-called "digital divide" could be determined by:

• The skill digital of teachers (Pérez, 2019),
• The access of academic staff and student body to the basic technical means (Wifi, electricity and devices such as PC, Tablet or telephone) to be able to receive training with active methodologies and personalised accompaniment to achieve application challenges.
• The speed of the education administration to adopt changes in the training of academic staff.

The case of the University of Navarra

As of March 2019, the University of Navarra delivered 51 online sessions for the digital training of its academic staff with some 1437 participants. All this training was carried out by the Quality and Innovation Service, manager of the training professor of academic staff.  

During these months, the sessions were aimed at two very specific objectives: 

1. Finalise the teaching of semester. This required the digital training of academic staff in tools such as Meet, Zoom, Panopto and the university's virtual classroom (Blackboard). Some 30 sessions were held over two weeks (11 to 25 March) with a duration of 45 minutes ( average ).
2. Ordinary and extraordinary exams. 9 sessions were held from 1 to 9 April with a duration of 2 hours average .

In addition to this training, it was necessary to establish means of tutoring academic staff and permanent coordination with IT Services (IT Services) and the staff administration and services related to teaching (secretaries, programs of study and course coordinators, teaching committees, etc) as well as the establishment of Office of the Executive Council guidelines were essential.

Once the regular exam period (May) was over and the regular exam period (June) was underway, a two-week online course entitled "Redefining the teaching face-to-face" was held. The aim of goal was to help academic staff to design flexible subjects that could be adapted to different scenarios (100% online, 50% face-to-face) during the 20-21 academic year. This not only required further training in more participatory teaching tools and methodologies, but also the promotion of places at meeting to share experiences and teaching practices carried out during those months.