The PERFORMANCE SIMULATOR® is a web- and media-based training tool for targeted competence development and assessment. With the innovative technology of the PERFORMANCE SIMULATOR® necessary learning and change processes can be established in an efficient way. In PERFORMANCE SIMULATOR® real-life situations are authentically simulated with video frequencies, which have to be evaluated by trainees. With the immediate feedback by the virtual coach the trainee can transfer the gained experience into new knowledge and, hence, develop respective competences.
Government Initiative of the Chinese Ministry of Education
The overall quality of teachers is still not high in the remote areas, especially in the rural areas of central and western China. In order to enhance the overall quality and professionalism of teachers from primary and secondary schools, the Chinese government made a plan to train teachers every five years, starting in 2010.
The National Teacher Training Program (NTTP) is fully implemented by the Chinese Ministry of Education and Ministry of Finance. Nine of the best Normal Universities have been chosen to implement the program into the regular day-to-day school life – the ECNU being one of those nine universities
In 2014, as part of an initiative of the Chinese Government called “China’s National Teacher Training Program” to reform the educational sector in the medium- and long-run, Professor Dr. Zhiting Zhu and Professor Dr. Hanbing Yan from the ECNU started implementing an extensive education and further training program. The primary goal is to significantly increase educational opportunities and learning progresses of pupils and students through a targeted use of digital media during lessons. The long-term oriented program started in 2015 with the expressive title “Technology Changes Teaching“.
It focuses on the following five crucial questions:
- How can students be supported through digital media in their individual self-learning processes?
- Which significance does the variety of modern information media have for academic practices?
- How can information technology be selectively applied to the day-to-day school life?
- How can information technology and its application increase the learning success of an individual?
- Which possibilities do modern Learning Management Systems or e-learning tools for knowledge query and evaluation of learning efficiency offer?
ECNU PERFORMANCE SIMULATOR® Technology Changes Teaching – Organization and Management of the IT-Supported Class
In order to achieve the objective, the Chinese Ministry of Education developed a comprehensive competence model in close cooperation with educational experts from the ECNU and 13 additional experts from all over China. It allows to include and make tangible the primary targets of the reform project in individual development plans of Chinese teachers.
S&P Consulting – with its long-lasting expertise in the fields of developing and producing competence models, web-based PERFORMANCE SIMULATOR®, modern Learning Management Systems as well as Communication and Learning Platform concepts – was able to contribute a crucial amount of work to validate and operationalize the defined competences.
To operationalize the competences, observation criteria were assigned to defined observation characteristics. Every observable manifestation/sequence of action was termed. By doing so, it is possible to measure the competences in individual development plans and to use them as a basis for the PERFORMANCE SIMULATOR® and further e-learning tools.
In this context, the first project of the “ECNU-S&P Research Center for ICT-Enabled Systemic Changes and Innovations” was the production of the ECNU PERFORMANCE SIMULATOR® Technology Changes Teaching – Organization and Management of the IT-Supported Class.
Deriving Guidelines for the PERFORMANCE SIMULATOR®
- Mastering information ethics and information security consciousness, capability of being a role model
- Designing teaching strategy and approach to improve the cooperation, communication, reflection, and the creativity of students
- Ensuring that equipment and technology resources are utilized in the classroom
- Ensuring that students have a convenient and secure access to networks and are able to utilize resources
- Ensuring that each student has an equal access to technology resources, inspiring their interest in learning and maintaining their attention to learning
- Ensuring that students have opportunities to participate in learning activities in form of collective, group and individual learning
- In the course of information teaching, observe and collect feedback from the students, adjust teaching behaviors accordingly
- Depending on the learning situation and technology resources, exploit the technology tools to collect the feedbacks from the students to design learning activities appropriately
- Encouraging students to participate in the teaching process, leading them to promote their technology literacy and make the best of technical advantages
- Encouraging students to actively explore the utilization of new technology resources, holding the learning activities creatively
- Guiding students to use assessment tools to carry out self-assessment and peer-assessment, thus doing well with process and summative evaluation learning
As part of the initiative the PERFORMANCE SIMULATOR® is integrated into a nationwide accessible Learning Management System. Being a central element, the PERFORMANCE SIMULATOR® contributes to the targeted competence development of Chinese teachers. The involved teachers are able to use the Learning Management System with different terminal devices independent of time and space. They can train their competences at their individual pace and with different learning materials.
Premises for Technology Changes Teaching – Organization and Management of the IT-Supported Class
- In the developed simulations users of the PERFORMANCE SIMULATOR® are consciously confronted with modern technology that can be used for the achievement of teaching goals
- Method diversity has a positive influence on the learning success, which is also demonstrated by studies from the area of neurology or constructivism
- The challenge is to find an appropriate method and a suitable medium for the learning content in the variety of media. This challenge increases with a growing number of learning media
- The critical scenes simulate that a modern medium is not automatically suitable for every learning content just because it is innovative
- The potential of technology in learning can only be utilized when it is implemented in the right way and suits the learning content. Otherwise, the effect of new media in learning can even be counterproductive
The ECNU finalized the PERFORMANCE SIMULATOR® and is currently in the distribution phase.
You can find further information on the PERFORMANCE SIMULATOR® on our website.