The Advanced Training System for Emergency Management (A-TEAM) is a consortium project funded in part by the Information Society Technologies (IST) framework of European Commission DG Information Society.The intent of the A-TEAM project is to teach people the possible consequences of various hazardous scenarios and to allow them to practice under conditions as close as possible to the real hazardous events. The training for the management of technological and environmental emergencies faces the difficulty of a domain where realistic experimentation is impossible and personal experience is scarce. Experiential learning, or learning-by-doing with mentoring and coaching support are effective methods for acquiring practical skills in a very complex and ill-structured domain with an enormous range of possible situations. The use of computer simulations combined with multimedia distance learning delivery can help to overcome some of the problems encountered where students need a variety of realistic exercises on which to practice emergency scenarios as well as the knowledge of how to apply these skills.
The teaching and learning process represents a complex set of interactions between a student (or group of students) and a teacher (or a teaching system). The goal for designing learning environments is to engage students in meaningful interaction with the content. The challenge for A-TEAM will be in determining an approach to training emergency response management to a diverse audience with different roles and different needs for training.
The project faces many technical challenges as well as unique opportunities to learn how to implement an effective training environment in a complex domain. As the advisors on pedagogical issues for the project, CSALT staff have many questions to answer, such as:
- How do you build a training framework that can act as a decision support system for sophisticated users, a teaching systemfor those who need to learn, a coaching system for practicing sophisticated skills, and an assessment system?
- What is the best way to integrate computer based distance learning approaches and real-time management scenarios that require decisions under stress in an action oriented real- time virtual reality training scenario?
- What is the most appropriate way to monitor, provide feedback and assess learner performance while they are engaged in real-time training scenarios?
Pedagogical framework: CSALT will develop a framework that outlines fundamental pedagogical issues and questions that will help the team make decisions about how to go about developing the A-TEAM Training System. The framework will include descriptions of theoretical approaches to designing interactive environments, models for teaching and learning, and contexts for learning.
Evaluation: CSALT will evaluate the effectiveness and acceptance of courses developed using the A-TEAM Training System.
Ms. Janet McCracken
Dr Bob Kemp
Mr Ian Nicoll
Project Partners
The A-TEAM consortium brings together nine institutions from eight countries. The team combines three academic institutions, Lancaster University, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Technical University of Catalonia with six partners from private industry that are active in the area of training, multi-media systems, and safety engineering and related training and consultancy. The team will work with a number of public institution and private companies that will server as the test users. The team combines a considerable range of diverse experience and backgrounds, that is well matched with the work package partner responsibilities
Look here for project reports as they become available
For more information, visit the A-TEAM web site at http://www.ess.co.at/A-TEAM/