WFD-Community - Collaborative learning community for water professionnals

 

The project consists in creating a Continuous Education and Training scheme for water professionals, based on collaboration between peers, working together on the implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD), through a Virtual Learning Community (VLC).

The target public gathers junior and senior executives from basin organizations - members of the International Network of Basin Organizations (INBO) at European level, confronted with the implementation of the WFD, to help them "learning by doing".

The VLC will help to train the junior managers in charge of integrated water management, backing them with the experience of the senior staff, either as tutors, or as contributors to exchanges, thus bringing to the young people their knowledge and know how both formal and informal, and getting back an actualization of their own knowledge.

 

A group of 20 trainees (junior staff) will be divided into working groups having each the responsibility for digging one side of WFD ; group leading consists in distributing tasks towards the individuals to organize the exchanges, to moderate the forums, to synthesize the various contributions, to bring complementary elements to feed the exchanges (documents, testimonies, case studies…), to organize virtual conferences via Internet with ad hoc experts, all actions which make it possible to improve the quality of work.

Each individual trainee will be a contributor in all groups, will have to prepare inputs on sub topics, will carry out monographs on the implementation of WFD in his context, …

The group discussions will be widely open to senior professionals, to get their thoughts based on hands-on practices.

The role of the teachers will be to define the course path and milestones, to supervise the exchanges, to guide the students and help them to analyze the external inputs, to provide additional resources if needed, and to assess the results to validate acquired knowledge.

Each group will profit from the coaching of a senior ; it will be basically a matter of guidance of the group in the reflexive analysis on its own work, and of helping it to mobilize complementary resources.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The various contributions will be capitalized to feed a base of knowledge, for further users.

The technological system will be multilingual and include a machine translation.

 

 

The project will consist in working out the operational specifications of the VLC, in developing the technical and methodological tools, and then in testing them full-scale for 18 months ; at the end an assessed methodology and tools for running a collaborative learning scheme will be available, and the teaching/learning framework will have been studied and formalized.

The Charter will be based on a reference frame, which will include the course description, the milestones to be validated, the methods for assessing the knowledge, etc.

 

The partnership gathers Basin Organizations (Apele Romane, INBO), the University of Bucharest and Water Training and Information Centers (OIEau, Gdansk Water Foundation, Hydrocontrol) over 36 months duration:

 

 

 

·         OIEau is the contracting body and the technical coordinator of the project, in charge of settingt up the Operational Unit of the Project, which will organize, based on the expertise of the partners, the drafting of the specifications, then the experimental phase, before assessing the feasibility of the community.

 

·         INBO brings the validation widened through its members and will control the diffusion and the promotion of the results.

 

·         HyC is more particularly responsible for the assessment of results, and the dissemination of the intermediate and final results, thanks in particular to its close partnership with the network Techware ; its experts will also intervene at the time of the technical exchanges and it will be also charged to mobilize Italian participants.

 

·         The Gdansk Water Foundation takes part as an expert to feed the specifications of the system, and it will take part in the mobilization of Polish executives to take part in the experiment and to collect the data near them for the evaluation.

 

·         Apele Romane represents the beneficiaries, and will bring its expertise on the needs, its personnel to make the tests (several junior managers, a tutor and senior professionals participating in the exchanges) and to validate the operation of the community ; AR will be the pilot of the experimental phase.

 

·         The University of Bucharest is charged within the project to validate the teaching specifications, to take part in the evaluation of the experimental phase and to seek the conditions of recognition and validation of the training.

 

 

The funding of the project (Euro 380 000) is 75 % supported by the European programme Leonardo da Vinci, and 25 % by the consortium members.