Swimming TIES

TIES is a 24 month project funded under the Leonardo da Vinci, Lifelong Learning Programme of the Education & Culture DG of the European Union. The kick-off meeting for TIES was held in Selfoss, Iceland on the 28th October 2008.

The goal of TIES (Technology and Innovation in Educating Swimmers) is: Improving the quality and cost effectiveness of Scandinavian swimming teacher education using advanced on-line and audio-visual technologies.

The partners are:

• P0 (Lead) -- The University of Iceland (IS)
  
• P1 -- The Icelandic Swimming Association (IS)
  
• P2 -- The University of Edinburgh (UK)
  
• P3 -- CAPDM Ltd, Edinburgh (UK)
• P4 -- The University of Copenhagen (DK)

19th - 21st May, 2010. The fourth TIES project meeting took place at the University of Copenhagen Sports Campus. The venue was the unusual, but quite wonderful, Green Lighthouse -- Denmark's first public carbon neutral house.

A number of new courses have been added to the learning site since the last meeting, including:

1. Child Development (University of Copenhagen)
2. Organising the Learning Environment (University of Copenhagen)
3. Periodisation (Icelanding Swimming Association
4. The Coach as a Leader (Icelanding Swimming Association

The schedule for the development of the remaining eight courses was agreed, as was the revisions of current courses. All 18 should appear between this meeting and the middle of July. Testing and feedback will be organised in the next two weeks and should start mid-June. Though there is still a lot of hard work to be done, the group are able to report that the projet is on schedule and should produce a full set of results by the project end date.

In contrast to the opening meeting in Iceland, where everything was white with snow, this meeting took place in blazing sunshine!

1st May, 2010. Another two courses -- Child Development and Organising the Learning Environment -- have been loaded up on the TIES Learning Environment. Both of these courses have been developed by the University of Copenhagen. Other courses will follow shortly.

25th February, 2010. The TIES Moodle sites goes live with the first six, fully developed courses up-loaded. The courses -- developed by the University of Edinburgh partner -- cover the full range of principles of swimming technique, specifically:

1. Using Forces
2. Developing Economy
3. The Rolling Strokes (Crawl and Backstroke)
4. The Undulating Strokes (Butterfly and Breaststroke)
5. Turns
6. Starts

16th - 18th August, 2009. The third TIES meeting was held at the University of Limerick, Eire, to coincide with the ISBS 2009 conference which featured a applied session day on Swimming.

The early Swimming courses have been further developed to provide a template for other courses that will follow shortly. Much of the meeting discussed pedagogical aspects of the course design and overall approach, in particular how to make best use of video to develop the powers of observation of the target student audience. As the project heads towards the mid-point of the project the emphasis will be on completing and delivering a further set of courses for tests and evaluation. These will appear in September and October 2009.

The Applied Swimming session at ISBS was attended by no less than 77 coaches. The day proved to be a big success -- and this 'applied day' format will be repeated at future ISBS conferences.

5th - 7th March, 2009. The second TIES meeting was held in Edinburgh, UK, at the University of Edinburgh's Department of Sports Science.

The team saw a demonstration of a first Swimming unit implemented using the agreed TIES course design. All TIES learning materials will be mastered in DocBook XML, which ensures that courses can be delivered through a wide range of learning environments, but also as printed materials and as PDFs for local use. This first course was delivered through a customised, styled Moodle learning environment. An evaluation of this demonstration led to minor updates of the design, but a healthy input of new ideas for enhanced learning support, many of which centred on the effective use of video. This demostration course will be updated in the next few weeks to reflect these inputs and should provide a very sound foundation for the design, development and delivery of other courses.

The team accepted a fairly demanding development schedule, but one which should ensure that the project will deliver on all its objectives. The next meeting is scheduled for Ireland, to co-incide with the ISBS Conference in August 2009.