EKT Advanced e-learning system for In- School placement

EKT project developed an advanced e-learning system for in-school teaching practice (in-school placement) by integrating, adapting and improving different existent open source tools (some of them provided by technological partners), as well as designing some new features to provide support for communication, reflection and follow-up for students, teachers and mentors.
Today there are a number of e-learning tools that provide several generic educational services such as communication, documents repository, e-Portfolios, agendas, etc. but there are not specific platforms that support the process of future teachers in-school placement, taking into account a tailored response to the needs of all the participant agents in the process.
The complexity of this task meant the identification of the most appropriate features and tools and their adaptation to create a unified platform, providing a seamless connection and exchange of information between tools to provide an informative dashboard for teachers and students, meeting the methodological requirements and the needs for improvement detected
in teaching practices. The challenge was also to make interoperable technological tools provided by both private companies and opensource developments and articulate them around a versatile system of tools and digital resources for training in student teacher’s practice.

This report describes the process of developing the EKT e-learning platform and its architecture and functionalities. It also includes demo access so that it can be tested and links to download the source code of the EKT platform. it is therefore a report describing a collective creation.

The EKT technological platform is the result of an interdisciplinary work carried out by the technological partners of the consortium on the basis of the needs analysis carried out in (WP2) and the educational and technological framework defined in (WP3: Educational and technological framework for development of professional competences in in-school placement (Final version). Its development has been defined by a Design-Based Research process piloted by USC and CESGA with two iterations in two academic years and in 5 European Initial Teacher Education institutions.

This EKT platform, together with the EKT educational and technological framework finally integrate the EKT elearning system for internships and constitute an innovative proposal for initial teacher training.