Today, the national education systems are confronted with great challenges as a result of Covid-19, which has led the government and educational institutions to seek new teaching methodologies that will allow them to continue their pedagogical processes remotely.

However, not all modalities have been successful in transitioning towards remote education, being the Technical and Vocational Education Training (TVET) one of the most affected, having been prevented from its normal development, predominantly presence-based and practical modalities, as it accounts for its teachers’ wide technological gap.

The implementation of virtual educational environments for TVET is a pending debt, especially considering that 11th and 12th graders in TVET secondary schools reach a 92% average school vulnerability index (IVE) (JUNAEB 2019), while market demands increasingly require these professionals incorporated into the system with a clear focus on productivity and national development, as SOFOFA has detected in its estimates: a deficit that exceeds 600 thousand professional technicians.

What Problems Are TVET Teachers Facing Today?

What Are We Looking For?

TP Digital seeks to enhance the teaching-learning processes with the support of virtual tools that allow teachers to acquire new digital skills, speed up the educational process, favor collaborative work and encourage the development of more meaningful experiences for students.

What sets TP Digital apart from all other methods, is not limited to the repository of dynamic and interactive resources for a practical, organized and contextualized training of specialties according to the Chilean curriculum, but it also offers online and real time advice and feedback for teachers on the application of the most suitable methodologies and pedagogical strategies to work with these resources remotely or on both learning modalities. This way, it covers both the application of technical and specialized content and the development of pedagogical elements in the use of digital resources for PT education.

The initiative, promoted by Fundación Chile and Microsoft with the sponsorship of the Ministry of Education and the collaboration of Inacap and Intelitek, has been built on the experience and expertise deployed throughout the country in programs such as EducarChile, Mejor Liceo, Redes Futuro Técnico and Eleva, the latter with extensive networking with Technical Vocational Training (TVT) institutions in the regions of Arica and Tarapacá, Antofagasta, Coquimbo, Valparaíso and Metropolitana.

Along with meeting the needs of Technical Vocationa Education Training (TVET) in the current Covid-19 context, it is expected that this project will permeate the secondary high schools’ pedagogical practices, where digital resources are transformed into the students’ regular learning experiences for a quality education that responds to the digital context in which the world now turns.

How Do We Do It?

• We have a learning management platform, LMS Territorium, which will allow teachers and heads of the TPUs access to resources and technical-pedagogical advisory services with online and real time tutors.
• Each teacher accesses the platform and searches for the training module corresponding to his/her specialty. There they find resources in a variety of formats such as capsules, computer graphics, simulations, cases, explanatory videos, exercises, among others, which include associated indications (didactic sequence, location in the curricular framework and feedback instructions) and tasks that the teacher must develop.
• The teacher can ask questions about the resources, activities and their application through the consultation forum that has been specially set up for this purpose. The forum consultations are answered in a maximum of 24 hours by a specialized teacher. They can also share their own material and good practices through the collaborative forum, as well as obtaining recognition badges according to their activity on the platform, positioning their profile among the rest of the participating teachers.
• The initiative includes sessions with tutors and support from technical specialists.

Who Benefits From TP Digital?

The initiative will benefit 226 Technical Vocational Education Training (TVET) teachers in the specialties of Electricity, Electronics, and Industrial Mechanics, and indirectly 5,150 students in the regions of Arica and Parinacota, Tarapacá, Antofagasta, Atacama, and Coquimbo.

TP Digital is conceived as an initiative with a long-term projection of permanence in the educational system, replicable to other technical-vocational training specialties, and to other regions of the country, thus multiplying the initiative’s impact.

For further consultations you may contact lorena.ortiz@consultor.fch.cl

Collaboration and Life

This effort is part of Colaboración y Vida (Collaboration and Life); name given by Fundación Chile to the work they are deploying in response to the health and economic crisis caused by CoVid-19; with a special focus on the design of agile, scalable, and socially impacting initiatives and solutions. We are certain that the only way to tackle this crisis and move forward is by doing it collectively. Learn more here.