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Virtual education network for textile careers: A German model - II

The Gesamttextil Training Series has been of considerable importance in the German textile industry when it came to further training for master’s and technician’s certificates and for polytechnic engineering degrees. It is also an important aid in all sectors connected with textiles.

The textile industry has 20 different careers requiring an apprenticeship, and only a small number of trainees per trade compared with the metal, electrical and chemical industries. Thus no educational publisher has been prepared to produce teaching material for this small and specialised market. The editions would be too small - between 1,000 and 3,000 copies per publication.

Adopting the motto “An aid to self-help”, since 1975 the employers’ group in the General Association for the German Textile Industry has addressed the task of publishing specialist educational works on its own account for careers requiring an apprenticeship, in order to ensure a high quality of training. Up till now, financial resources and staff availability have made it possible to bring out an average of two training manuals a year. In the past a team of authors, composed of up to ten trainers and vocational-college teachers, have worked in an honorary capacity to produce educational materials reflecting the targets set in the training regulations and curricula at vocational colleges. This needed four or five meetings per book for consultation, editorial work and release. The Gesamttextil Training Series was intended primarily for trainers, vocational-college teachers and trainees. It has been of considerable importance in the textile industry when it came to further training for master’s and technician’s certificates and for polytechnic engineering degrees. It is also an important aid in all sectors connected with textiles. Teachers and trainers work in all educational institutions, teaching individual textile technologies such as yarn manufacture, surface production and profile structures, textile finishing, textile design, clothing manufacture and design, as well as product knowledge covering the area of clothing textiles, household and home textiles and technical textiles, and they use these training manuals, too.

While using the Gesamttextil training handbooks, teachers at vocational colleges, polytechnics and universities also prepare their own course material, without consultation with other colleagues. This is a waste of resources. Nor, because of the limited sales volume, have the educational publishers so far put any multimedia teaching or learning aids on the market. Yet demand is constantly rising from educational institutions and industrial companies. Meanwhile many of the 70 training books produced so far (with an average of 400 pages) are out of date or out of print; even now nothing has been produced on some subjects, such as product knowledge.

Motivation for change

The following trends mean that the previous procedure needs change:

1. Staff scarcity means that hardly any companies can give trainers leave to work on a completely new book or to assist in updating an existing one, so that a smaller and smaller number of staff are producing or updating more and more teaching material. Moreover, people have been less and less willing for some years now to produce the texts on an honorary basis, so that teachers from educational institutions have been in increasing demand.

2. Resources of staff and money at Gesamttextil mean that only two training books a year maximum can be produced, so that, given the existence of 70 training manuals, the renewal cycle is 35 years. A way must be found to ensure permanent availability and the most up-to-date knowledge.

3. However, changes in teaching and learning methods, as well as knowledge management, require new kinds of course material and teaching aids, and this is not achievable using the previous procedures in book form.

4. Pure academic knowledge, as prescribed in regulations and curricula, are no longer sufficient nowadays. It must be expanded to include knowledge based on the proper experience. Because of the outmoded staffing structures prevalent in companies, this knowledge based on experience is threatened with extinction. It is important to retain this knowledge since, in the wake of specialisation, companies are becoming more and more different from each other in the products they manufacture and there are scarcely any more competitors in the home market.

Since, given the circumstances shown in this description of the current situation, the textile industry needs expert knowledge (which must be retained and expanded), which the educational publishers cannot provide, while the educational institutions at all levels, working in parallel and without consultation, are producing their own written material, of various quality and only for their particular target group, the textile industry, represented by Gesamttextil, its umbrella organisation, will create, on its own initiative, what is needed to provide an “aid to self-help.” This will be in the form of a virtual training network.

The idea is that an educational institution will act as sponsor for a particular production and processing technology, undertaking overall supervision, while the other educational institutions and the industry itself constantly provide this institution with their knowledge, their experience and the material they have available, including the latest results from research institutes, for permanent updating. On this basis a link-up will be formed between all the educational institutions in question, as providers, recipients and supervisors, thus creating a self-supporting education network.

The benefits are obvious: just a small number of specialists will encapsulate their knowledge for everyone and make it available to all. It will then be accessible via the Internet, at any time, anywhere it is needed, and for any purpose. In a pilot project, covering material for the thematic course division of environmental protection, safety at work and quality management, and making partial use of an educational platform already on the market, a small group of project associates and educational institutions will be extending a cross-level training platform to subsume an open educational community. In this process it will be necessary to train editorial teams, authors, tutors and multipliers to structure and prepare multimedia-teaching units. The process is limited to two-and-a-half years.

After this will come the next stage, a snowball system for overall coverage, in which the experience gained in the pilot project will be expanded to additional training sponsors and the technologies with which they are familiar - something which the industry intends to manage on its own. This pilot project is being supported by the German Ministry of Education & Research as part of its “New Media in Education” programme, and by the GMD, the project sponsor.

Network partners

Among other things, the project envisages permanently ending the existing juxtaposition of educational hierarchies, to replace them with a network. In this way, a number of those involved in the educational institutions concerned will form a “common core”, in which vocational-college teachers, trainers, representatives of technical colleges, polytechnics, universities and technical universities will use their joint knowledge and experience to support a technology sponsor, who in turn will be supported by external educationists and multimedia experts. The thematic course sections thus built up will then be available to the course teachers and course-material providers. As far as retraining or further training is concerned, however, we assume that subjective relations between teacher and taught must continue to exist, i.e. that classroom teaching must alternate in proper sequence with periods of private study. For both course teachers and students (the main target group), “knowledge and success” is a central component of study. The important thing for them is to be supplied with the latest information, quickly and in close proximity to the workplace, and then to be able to consult course units or simulation models if the situation so demands.

As project manager and co-ordinator, Gesamttextil will undertake the task of controlling, consulting and monitoring quality and costs. Gesamttextil will also chair the project’s steering group, which will deal with methodological, organisational and technical problems and their solution, while supporting the technology sponsors. To ensure that the flow of knowledge and information, both within and around the textile-education network, is efficient and properly structured and controlled, the idea is to realise this concept in separate database platforms. Within the so-called media database it is intended to administer and store innovative course material and memory-intensive components belonging to course modules (videos, simulations) in internet-capable formats.

The media database has a non-centralised structure and can be distributed over a number of sites. Its task is to gather unstructured innovative knowledge and information, as well as the relevant study aids, provided by universities, teachers, companies, mechanical-engineering firms etc. These ancillary objects do not themselves have any direct link with the textile course-modules still to be developed. These will be composed in a structured way in the structured database, to be developed or adapted in parallel, and offered to potential participants. This structured database will form the core of the textile education network. It will utilise the possibilities of the internet standard and replication of databases. Changes in the database will be directly available on the internet. Course material will be available here in linear modules (HTML), and this material will be complemented by highly interactive multimedia course units from the media database. Thus authors and experts will be able to provide the education network with their knowledge in a structured way without any multimedia knowledge. Information flow on the textile education network Course of project To realise this pilot project, “Environmental protection, safety at work and quality management”, three work packages are envisaged as a possible approach.

Taking the experience gained during the pilot project, the results of work on organisation, co-operation and selection of partners will be discussed finally and transferred as “best practice” for building up the network as a whole. For this purpose, those taking part in the project must already draw up a cost schedule during the preparatory stage, using the offers received, and this schedule must provide estimates on build-up and maintenance costs for putting the whole range of Gesamttextil training manuals onto the education network within six to eight years. Once a beginning has been made in using the new media for training, continued training and further training, the first great step, as required by knowledge management, will have been taken towards securing the existence of the industry. Only well developed “knowledge networking”, which gathers and distributes knowledge, can ensure that the industry’s knowledge is made available to all those working in it and that competitiveness grows through value addition. Gesamttextil and its affiliated associations are laying the future foundations for this.

Dietmar Fries