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GeNEdu News: GeNEdu event week 11th – 15th October 2021

Xiang He, GeNEdu Project Manager, Executive

Through great efforts from all partner institutions, the GeNEdu project consortium organized a successful event week in mid-October in a hybrid mode across four countries. The first day was dedicated to the GeNEdu Mid Conference with a focus on project management issues, and the rest of the week to the 4-day Train-the-Trainer (TtT) programme.

The entire event was jointly planned by the coordinating institution JAMK University of Applied Sciences (JAMK) and the two host institutions Guangdong Medical University, GDMU in China and Hanze University of Applied Sciences, HUAS in the Netherlands. GDMU hosted all project members from the three Chinese partner institutions and HUAS hosted half of the members from the European institutions; the other half of the European members participated from Finland and Estonia in a remote way.

On Monday 11th October, the Mid Conference began with a fantastic Opening Ceremony led by GDMU, where more than 50 Chinese participants were present on-site and interacted with 15 European participants via a live stream platform. During the Conference, many topics were covered:

  • Main achievements by the mid-term of the GeNEdu implementation
  • Improvement proposals from the Academic Advisory Board and Project Management Group
  • Partner institutions’ inputs to the possible extension of project eligibility period, and management practices needed for the preparation of the extension
  • Revised plan for the dissemination and exploitation activities
  • Group work: SWOT analysis of the project progress.

Along with discussions generated around these topics, participants were engaged to the common vision of the project, to the key priorities of upcoming activities, and to the opportunity to acquire even better success during the second half of the project implementation. A potential extension to the project eligibility period to achieve the best possible outcome at the end was also discussed.

Read more about the GeNEdu project here!

GeNEdu project team

(Photo by HUAS School of Nursing: project members from HUAS and JAMK at the Mid Conference on 11 Oct 2021)

After the Mid Conference day, the consortium implemented the TtT programme in “Integrating digital technologies into gerontological nursing curricula” in accordance with the GeNEdu project plan. Four concentrated days were spent together with two lead experts (participating from HUAS, the Netherlands) and 35 training participants (participating from GDMU, China) via a live stream tool. This TtT was built as an e-course utilizing JAMK’s e-learning platform, where all training materials, guiding documents, and assignments were shared. Each training day was themed around different targets and supported with many showcases and examples from the Netherland and Finland, such as the following:

GeNEdu graph

Participants from China also gave informative presentations during the TtT programme. They presented the analysis of digital technologies used in nursing education in China, including the related literature review, design of an online survey in 3 Chinese partner institutions, current situation, and future needs for the usage. Furthermore, on the last day, they shared the institutional perspectives of building living labs at their own campuses, as well as utilizing the living labs as one learning environment to support all newly developed gerontological nursing courses starting from the following semester.

Despite the distance between trainers and trainee groups, and the limitation of the live stream tools, all participants were open to various forms of learning and fostered interaction as much as possible. The last day presentations from China served as proof that the participants from all three Chinese partner institutions had indeed digested the essential concepts introduced by the experts and were ready to apply their new skills and knowledge to the practice of building the living labs in their own institutions. The online feedback collected from the participants after the programme received a 100 % response rate with the average score of satisfaction reaching 4.52 out of 5.

The whole event week was finished with a Closing Ceremony chaired by GDMU. The participants enjoyed a great moment when a highlight video was presented on the screen: selected thematic photos taken by the event participants appeared with cheers and applauds echoing in the background.

See also news post from HUAS on 14th October (in Dutch) & Wechat post from GDMU on 26th October (in Chinese).