The second transnational meeting of IOTOAI project has been held in two days the 31st March  and the 28th April 2020.

This time the partners of the consortium met in a Skype conference due to the world emergency caused by COVID-19.

The transnational meeting was very productive, and it was held thanks to a clear agenda realised by the coordinator of the project and thanks to the support of the other partners.

IoToAI is a project that involves partners from different European countries: Northern Ireland, Italy and Spain and it is funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ programme, Key Action 2 (Strategic Partnership for Innovation and Exchange of good practices).

The aim of IOTOAI project is to develop a specific and innovative training for modernising workers’ and students’ profiles.

Thanks to this project, the industry will also benefit, because the technicians will have the chance to apply the knowledge acquired in the training course within their factories or sectors, as they can be part of ICT departments in charge. At the same time, young employees with a completely different professional background and high IT affinity are coming forward.

This project will contribute to a higher quality of education and training offering by developing different training paths for VET students and attracting HE graduates to an innovative VET.

During the meeting partners discussed the milestones of the project.

In the first day, on the 31st March, the project coordinator BELFAST METROPOLITAN COLLEGE gave a warm welcome to the partners and also explained in detail way what concerns the section of the project mangment implementation, referring to the presentation of the quality assurance manager in verifying the possible risks and mitigation actions that consortium partners can undertake during the duration of the project.

During the meeting the leader of the IO1 explained the work done so far thanks to the help of the project partners.

IO1 consists in the realisation of a series of recommendations to be given to political authorities concerning the role of technology in today’s life and above all how it is possible to improve both the ICT and the SSH curricula thanks to KETs.

During the explanation of the IO1 partners hosted a representative Mrs. Dr. Gala Isabel Cano of the “Servicio de Empleo y Formación de la Región de Murcia” – Employment and Training Service of the Murcia Region – a Spanish VET Authority, to show to her the work realised and keep feedback on how on how to improve the product made.

This work was carried out through a detailed analysis of the current panorama in Italy, UK and Spain.

The third part of the meeting was dedicated to IO2. The IO2 leader gave a clear explanation of how the IoToAI VET Academic Curricula will be made.

Partners discussed in particular: the definition of training units and learning outcomes, how plan and organize training courses, which skills, knowledge, competences and evaluation methods to use and how to develop the teaching materials and then test them.

In the second day of the meeting, on the 28th April, Skills Divers responsible of the Quality and Assurance of the project gave to partners an update about the methodology used to monitoring the quality of the project and then it was followed by the responsible of the dissemination CEIPES that gave an update about the figures reached in all social media accounts and website of the project.

In a second moment always CEIPES has made a general overview on the IO1 of the project focusing in particular on the IO1A4, a report that contains recommendations that will be distributed to the VET authorities. All partners collaborated synergistically on this report and in mid-May it will be published and disseminated as the first result of the project.

Afterwards, representatives of Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, Belfast Met College and SKILLS DIVERS presented in depth the IO2 – IoToAI VET Academic Curriculum Design and Development.

In particular, according to the results of IO1, partners for the IO2 will select the most appropriate training contents with the form of “Learning Outcomes” (LOs) in the field of “Internet of Things”, “Artificial intelligence” and Cloud Computing that will be included in our VET curricula. IO2 implements the design of different training paths for the targeted students and job profiles of the project. This IO sets the main guidelines for development in IO3 – Toolkit for Blended Learning of IoToAI topics in VET.

During the explanation of the IO2 partners hosted Mr. Mathieu Kessler, Vice-rector of Information and Communication Technologies, from Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena to give a great presentation on some important tools that partners can use for the piloting phase and also for stored the training units online. In particular, he presented a result of an Erasmus+ Project named INDIE in which thanks to it, the organization involved are creating an e-learning platform with a wide range of interactives resources and also taking into account the interoperability among different software.

This was a great occasion to all partners to clarify some technical doubts about the e-learning platform to use and how structured the course.

In the last part of the meeting representative of UPCT gave a great overview about the IO3 that, as we said above, is linked with the development of the IO2.

The 2 days of meeting were very productive the consortium of partners will meet in a virtual way in a video call on 3rd June 2020 to give update on the progress of the project.

For more information visit the social pages Facebook and Twitter of the project.