Advancing Digital Education with Open Learning Environment

The ADELE project was a direct reaction to the fact that digital transformation of vocational education and training on the European continent was in dire need. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, the process of educational delivery had completely changed and revealed some serious flaws in digital preparedness of vocational institutions and their employees. Our four secondary vocational schools consortium in North Macedonia, Croatia, and Slovenia realised that teachers and learners needed enhanced digital literacy to keep pace with the fast-changing labour markets. The two had worked together before in the ERASMUS + IDADOHS project that created an open learning platform of educational resources. Although the technical infrastructure was available, there was an obvious missing element in terms of high-quality STEM content to fill such a setting and a consistent training on how to utilize it. Educators in our schools were not confident and competent in developing digital learning contents and learners were not able to access many interactive technological enhanced materials in their home learning situations. An additional necessity that was discovered by us was the necessity to have inclusive and accessible educational resources.

The ADELE project pursued three interconnected strategic objectives aligned with European educational priorities. First, we aimed to advance STEM digital transformation by enhancing the open learning platform developed in our previous IDADOHS project, incorporating innovative technologies including artificial intelligence to provide personalised learning pathways and interactive assessments for vocational students. Second, we sought to promote inclusion and diversity by applying universal design principles and culturally responsive pedagogy throughout all developed materials, ensuring learners with visual, auditory, or cognitive differences could fully access educational content. Third, we committed to creating high-quality open educational resources released under Creative Commons licensing, enabling free use, adaptation, and sharing across European vocational institutions. This supported lifelong learning opportunities beyond our immediate partnership. Underlying these objectives was our goal to strengthen educators' digital competencies, building their confidence and skills to develop and deliver technology-enhanced instruction that prepares students for modern labour market demands.

ADELE project involved 4 work packages that were interdependent and took place over a 24 months period. A good project governance was developed by having strong transnational partner meetings in North Macedonia, Croatia, and Slovenia, and with online arrangement of coordination meetings applying digital tools such as Asana, GoogleMeet and VIBER. The 28 educators of the partner institutions were trained during two intensive workshops in Zagreb and Gostivar on topics of digital content creation, use of platforms, and accessibility standards and universal design principles. The main action was the creation of 24 STEM courses in English (out of our target of 20) five courses each of the partner and four more courses of outside collaboration schools. All the contents were released as open learning resources on the IDADOHS platform. Such dissemination activities were held as local workshops to over 200 educators, presentations at large-scale events like Educational Rendezvous MASSUM 2025, INOVA-MLADI 2025 innovation exhibition, and the UP conference and careful quality assurance assessment efforts were carried out by specific partners charged with the responsibility of accessibility review, peer assessment and stakeholder feedback.

The ADELE project created 24 high-quality STEM courses in English (vastly surpassing our initial goal of 20) and included such disciplines as electrical engineering fundamental, computer programming, automation systems, mechanical design, and digital technologies. Every course was released as open educational resources on the Creative Commons licensing on the improved IDADOHS open learning platform, which currently boasts superior accessibility functions. The project directly prepared 28 educators (six professors and one administrator per partner institution) as developers of material and administrators of the platform, and all participants were provided with Europa pass certificates of the competences gained. Data on pre- and post-assessment showed that on average, trained educators were able to improve in scores in digital competency by 35%. Promotional events spread out among more than 200 other educators in the three partner countries at local workshops and four larger promotional events. The consortium also worked on a system of comprehensive digital content development training methodology in vocational education, quality assurance framework to assess open educational resource and best practice principles.