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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:
1st March, 2001. Course completion.
All 18 TIES courses are now complete and on-line. These courses span 6 Modules (that range from Beginner level to Advanced) and fit into three explicit themes: Swimming Skills, Coaching, and Training & Techniques.
For information, all content for these courses is single source mastered in XML DocBook and delivered into a Moodle environment and in PDF. The course materials are extremely rich, and include many hundreds of videos and images which are used to support a number of reflective activities, the input to which builds into a personal portfolio (in our case a Digital Work Book). The courses follow a consistent design, and their delivery is very highly integrated into the functionality of the learning environment -- which is very much a part of the overall delivery and not just a simple filestore. The consortium is extremely pleased with the final results and, in particular, with the very high degree of communications and co-operation achieved during the project.
6th January, 2011. Happy New Year from the TIES project.
Fourteen of the 18 courses are now availble through the TIES Moodle site, with the remaining four to be available in the next two weeks. The full set of modules and their courses will be made available to the Icelandic Swimming Association for use this year ... and beyond. Nearly there.
The Technology Transfer part of this project alone (and there has been significant exchange of Swimming Science too!) has been of great interest within the development phases, but the key to all such projects is a good team and people who can work together towards a common goal. The completeness and consistency of the courses will hopefully illustrate the closeness of the TIES consortium.
15th November, 2010. The TIES project formally closed. All 18 courses are nearing completion, and will be made available to the Icelandic Swimming Association through the TIES learning environment. The project will absolutely meet its aims of developing a full programme in Swim Coaching with a full suite of six modules, each with three courses. Details can be found here. It has been hard work, but the team will have delivered the goals of the project to a standard that will bear scrutiny.
TIES has been an ideal LdV project in that it has truly shown the value of a diverse team of European partners with a range of skills (from Sports Science & Coaching, to on-line distance learning development, to technical development & information management expertise) engaged in the ideals of Knowledge Transfer and the acquisition of new skills and qualifications.
22nd - 24th October, 2010. The fifth, and final, TIES project meeting took place at the University of Edinburgh's School of Education. Plans for the final stages of the project were discussed -- with a date for the close of the project of November 15th in mind. The main activities of the meeting were to finalise the content for the 18 courses that are being developed, and to film the remaining videos required using the faciltites at the University.
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:
- Child Development (University of Copenhagen)
- Organising the Learning Environment (University of Copenhagen)
- Periodisation (Icelanding Swimming Association
- 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:
- Using Forces
- Developing Economy
- The Rolling Strokes (Crawl and Backstroke)
- The Undulating Strokes (Butterfly and Breaststroke)
- Turns
- Starts
These courses provide a complete template and highlight the pedagogical approach being developed within TIES.
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. |