On April 5-29, 2021, there have been conducted certified in-house Online Teacher Training (OTT) courses on innovative methods of teaching and learning at Georgian Technical University within the Erasmus+ PRINTeL project, in order to offer additional professional development opportunities for GTU academic staff.

The objectives of the OTT courses were to increase the quality of academic teaching and learning in the university; to provide professional development opportunities for academic staff and teachers; to increase the capacity of the academic personnel through development of their technology-based teaching and learning skills as well as to improve learning outcomes.

Due to the Pandemic (COVID-19), 12 in-house TT training courses were conducted online, via the Zoom platform. The courses were held in the Georgian language. Herewith the knowledge of the English language and base knowledge of Ms Office programs were strongly required.

Those willing to take part in the training were able to choose the desired course (or courses) covering the following topics:

- Online active teaching & learning: experiences with technology

- Digitally supported learning and the digital competence framework for teachers

- Designing meaningful online learning
- Online learning tools. The importance of online learning during the pandemic
- Video as a learning tool for remote emergency teachers
- Online teaching revisited

Before the conduction of these trainings, GTU 12 ToTs had participated in 3-day online TT courses additionally provided within the project and kindly offered by the project European partners in February, 2021: Leuven Catholic University (Belgium), University of Barcelona (Spain), Porto University (Portugal), Linköping University (Sweden) and FH Joanneum Gesellschaft mbH (Austria).

It should be noted that above mentioned in-house training courses at GTU were in line with the courses offered by the project consortium partner European universities and the training courses were based on the experience and best practices of European universities’ professional development training centers.

In general the 3-day training in innovative teaching and learning envisaged workload of 9 hours presented in 3 hours per day, though there was the case when it became necessary to conduct extra online meeting as the participants were interested in the training content and online tools and they asked the trainer (Tamari Kupreishvili) for one more online meeting, because these 9 hours were not enough.

Academic staff of almost all the Faculties (including engineering, humanities, social sciences, agrarian, architecture, law, ICT fields) have been attending the training courses and the number of participants (total number of trained teachers is 195, with the limitation of 10-20 persons per group) indicates a widespread interest of the faculty and the trainees’ comments on the course content reflect their enthusiasm and willingness to be actively involved in the training activities related to the innovative methods for teaching and learning that especially became of great importance under the Pandemic challenges.

During the trainings the participants took an active part in the discussions; they talked about their experiences during the e-learning period, about the changes made to their courses to meet students’ requests during e-learning, etc.

After the finish of training course, the participants filled and submitted the OTT course evaluation questionnaires. Based on such feedbacks were conducted OTT course feedback evaluation reports and surveys as well.

Due to the surveys most of the participants were agreed that they had acquired new skills on innovative technology-enhanced teaching and learning methods needed so much to meet the challenges caused by Pandemic.

After the successful completion of the training, participants were awarded with relevant Certificates.

The OTT training courses within project PRINTeL at GTU were conducted in partnership with GTU Innovations Center.

Some statistics related to OTT courses carried out by GTU within the PRINTeL project in April 2021:

 In total 156 female and 39 male participants (from 195 teachers) have been trained during the OTT courses at GTU, among them 3 participants (female) were from another Georgian Higher Education Institutions: Agricultural University of Georgia, Caucasus International University, Millennium Teaching University.

Academic staff of the following 10 Faculties (from 12 Faculties) actively participated in 12 in-house OTT courses:

• Faculty of Engineering Economic, Media Technology and Social Sciences - 65
• Faculty of Civil Engineering – 34
• Faculty of Chemical Technology and Metallurgy - 18
• Faculty of Business Technology - 16
• Faculty of Law and International Relations – 15
• Faculty of Informatics and Control Systems – 15
• Faculty of Architecture, Urban Planning and Design – 14
• Faculty of Agricultural Science and Biosystems Engineering – 8
• Faculty of Power Engineering and Telecommunication – 6
• Faculty of Mining and Geology - 1

Detailed information about each 12 in-house OTT courses conducted at GTU are available on the following links on GTU website:

https://gtu.ge/Suss-Eng/News/?ELEMENT_ID=16742

https://gtu.ge/Suss-Eng/News/?ELEMENT_ID=16982

https://gtu.ge/Suss-Eng/News/?ELEMENT_ID=17012

https://gtu.ge/Suss-Eng/News/?ELEMENT_ID=17031

https://gtu.ge/Suss-Eng/News/?ELEMENT_ID=17038

https://gtu.ge/Suss-Eng/News/?ELEMENT_ID=17048

https://gtu.ge/Suss-Eng/News/?ELEMENT_ID=17050

https://gtu.ge/Suss-Eng/News/?ELEMENT_ID=17057

https://gtu.ge/Suss-Eng/News/?ELEMENT_ID=17060

https://gtu.ge/Suss-Eng/News/?ELEMENT_ID=17062

https://gtu.ge/Suss-Eng/News/?ELEMENT_ID=17132

https://gtu.ge/Suss-Eng/News/?ELEMENT_ID=17134

https://gtu.ge/Suss-Eng/News/?ELEMENT_ID=17148