Introduction
The Distance Learning Team was created in 2014, immediately after the concession of the auspices of the Department of Informatics & Telecommunications of the University of Thessaly to the Program “My name is Teacher” and the start of the research project, on the initiative of Professors Georgios Stamoulis and Dionysios Vavougios, President and Vice President of the Department respectively. They realized the prospect of the project and the direct compatibility of it with the initial mission and objectives of the Department. The creation and staffing of the research team, consisting of Ph.D. candidates and postgraduate students, began immediately, and the directions of the research project were defined: Education, Distance Learning, and Didactics.
Approach
At the beginning of 2015, the team’s presence in meetings and conferences for the promotion of the project was launched, where it was warmly welcomed as an innovative educational project. In the summer of 2015, we decided to present for the first time the didactic seminars of the Greek language for philologists in three free 6-hour lectures in Athens and Lamia, where we had the opportunity to inform colleagues about the work we promote in the field of education and to demonstrate the model that we advocate for the teaching of the Greek language. In addition to the “Advanced Teaching Models for teachers and trainers”, our team invests in the research and development of e-learning tools (modern and asynchronous) with emphasis on their teaching philosophy. Specifically, we develop asynchronous distance learning platforms, real-time video conferencing/virtual classroom tools, and telecommuting auxiliary gadgets, suitable for creating e-learning environments either remotely or supplementally.
Results
During all this successful course we have managed to:
- Create -according to the model of “My name is Teacher”- an electronic environment for teacher training through video under the name “Teacher’s place – Development of teaching models, Counseling”, where we developed the new video series “4Teachers” with topics of teaching, language, teaching quality.
- Strengthen the research team with new collaborators (postgraduate students, PhD and postdoctoral candidates) and assign research work to them on topics arising from aspects of the program.
- Have continuous presence with scientific articles in conferences and scientific journals until today.
- Create a team for the extroversion of our program with the media and in general to manage its contacts.