June 2021.
The kick-off meeting of the European project entitled “VRTEACHER – Virtual Reality-based Training to improvE digitAl Competences of teacHERs ” took place from Wednesday 9 June to Thursday 10 June 2021. The VRTEACHER project is funded under Key Action 2 of the Erasmus+ program and will last 2 years (01/06/202131/05/2023) with a total budget of 219,589.00euro.
The VRTEACHER project has the ambition to provide effective education responses related to educators’ training via using a novel VR-based pedagogical approach for virtual practicum. The project aims to address the need for modernization and digital transformation of teacher education and training and reinforce educators’ digital skills and readiness through a Virtual Reality (VR) training method and tool. The innovation of the project lies in addressing challenges related to class management in crisis situations, such as a pandemic, with the vision to equip teachers with key skills (e.g. empathy, perspective-taking, self-efficacy, adaptability, etc.) through immersive and experiential training experiences that reflect real-life scenarios and situations faced during a crisis. The main target groups of the VRTEACHER project are pre-service student teachers (higher education students, Ph.D. candidates, etc.), and in-service educators/teachers. The main outputs of the VRTEACHER project will be a VR-based competence framework for teacher training and a state-of-the-art VR teacher training application that reflects real-life-based teacher training needs. The project will advance the state of the art in the relatively new area of VR-based teacher training and aims to support novel VR-based initiatives in teacher education. An extensive evaluation of the impact of the proposed VR- based framework and tool will be conducted providing at the end of the project guidelines for the use of the VR-based approaches in teacher education. The VR application will be integrated both in pre-service and in-service teacher training initiatives.
The project involves six partners, Cyprus University of Technology (Cyprus / Coordinator), University of the Aegean, University Carlos III of Madrid (Spain), Fundación Siglo22 (Spain), Future In Perspective Limited (Ireland), Commonwealth Centre for Connected Learning (Malta). The project is coordinated by the Social Computing Research Center, through the Visual Media Computing Research Laboratory of the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts, Cyprus University of Technology.
More details about the project can be found here:
https://vmc.cut.ac.cy/vrteacher-home/
https://www.facebook.com/VRTEACHERproject
