IMPLEMENT THE WORK BASED PILOT LEARNING PROGRAMME IN RELATION WITH SERVICE TRACKING AND MONITORING AT THE FIELD LEVEL
The main output of the project related to personalized, precision learning, as an innovative VET method to develop work competence of our main target group, the rural advisors, will be carried out in this work step. It is based on a one full year circle of rural advisory service operation; because of the seasonal specificity of agricultural and rural activities to cover the typical cases, and due to the needed amount of data and experience to be accumulated.
In the previous worksteps, we will have achieved the necessary methodological and technical outputs to successfully engage into the pilot process which has the final goal of a precision learning programme, combined with the use of an online digital platform. However, we will also allow more traditional means of data acquisition methods, such as offline forms, excel files (etc.), and questionnaires (for those service providers having such preference), which we will be able to combine into the system.
Besides gaining data feedback from the service tracking system, we plan to arrange questionnaires and focus group discussions among participating advisors and samples of service clients near the end of the annual period, which will be analyzed, matched and re-validated against each other, that will ensure QA for the overall process as well.
In the course of advisory service implementation and tracking, we plan to reach our goal in two steps:
- Firstly, during the provision of the service: the indication of lacking special - technical - competence is when the advisor needs to assign an issue to another expert or superviser, asking for a solution (an answer, a clue, a proper piece of information, or broader knowledge, description). By the process flow of the system, when the assigned expert feeds back the solution, it is taken over by the advisor, and then delivers it further to the client, therefore the advisor actively participates in the validation and acceptance by the end user.
This a learning process by itself, which will be continuously monitored during this work phase, and strengthened by the work-based learning component.
Additionally, all solved issues should be examined at the supervisor / coordinator level of the system, and matched against the Knowledge Base. If the solution adds to the existing knowledge, it should be inserted into its proper position (by set up metadata structure), for easy retrieval to support the solutions in next cases.
- Secondly, the advisors’ performance will be profiled according to a special method, to be developed as a featured know-how of the project.
It should reflect his/her profile related to the well solved, least solved and unsolved issues, also measuring by the priority level of such issues (also recorded in the system) and the time performance (ratio of scheduled and completed time), as well as the content categorization of the issues (following the advisory service and activity areas, hierarchical taxonomy, O1 A1, A2).
Then this profile should be compared with the overall achievement of all advisors within RASP organisation, by the averages of all advisors, of the characteristics mentioned above, against the individual results.
Learning activity - precisely targeting the knowledge gaps of advisors according to their personal performance and corresponding needs - will be carried out in two stages:
- On the go, during the service implementation pilot phase. Monitoring the service provision process, advisors will receive exercises - in the form of online quizzes - quarterly, generated dynamically from the knowledge base of the service provider (of good practices, solutions, technologies, legal information etc), upon which the quiz will be made. The questions will be in context with the issues where the advisor lacked or had uncertainty in a certain topic. The results of the quiz will be taken into account at the year ending learning programme.
- At the end of the annual service operation. Evaluating each participating advisors’ service provision profile, as well as their activity during the quarterly tests, they will have to take a personalized programme, which will be offered and tested by blended learning.
The elements of innovation of this intellectual output are in accordance with the novel methods related to personalized, precision learning programmes.
In order to ensure EU wide impact and transferability potential, we design the learning programme in a way that service providers implementing a full fledged service tracking system, and those also applying data acquisition by traditional means, can equally design and carry out their own personalized, precision learning programme, benefitting from the results of our project. The relevant techniques and practices will be thoroughly documented and published in the RAMONES Guidebook.