**2. Enhancement of lifelong learning in Belarus through Erasmus+ BELL Project**

The international project of the European Union Program ERASMUS+ CBHE "Enhancement of Lifelong Learning in Belarus/BELL" has contributed to the achievement of good results in the development of the Lifelong Learning concept. The project *The Implementation of Best Practices of International Projects as the Way of Enhancement… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.111403*

is aimed at the joint development and implementation of training courses on topics, which are in demand among the population [2].

The development of distance courses was organized on the basis of advanced training institutes of six participating regional universities located in five regions of the Republic of Belarus.

In the course of the project, the staff involved in the project implementation, established new contacts and partnerships with Belarusian regional universities, such as Polotsk State University (PSU, Polotsk, Vitebsk region), Yanka Kupala State University of Grodno (YKSUG, Grodno), Belarusian State Agricultural Academy (BSAA, Gorki, Mogilev region), Brest State Technical University (BrSTU, Brest), Vitebsk State University named after P.M. Masherov (VSU, Vitebsk), as well as the universities in the European educational space: Rezekne Academy of Technologies (RTA, Latvia), Linnaeus University (Sweden); The University of Cádiz (Spain), The Open University (UK). The Belarusian teachers, researchers, and administrators have studied and adopted the experience of partners based on the project objectives.

It is worth noting the high level of integration of the educational process in Rezekne Academy of Technologies (RTA) in Latvia, the BELL project coordinator, with the production processes of the real sector economy of Latvia and the countries of the European Union. Within the framework of academic disciplines, course, and diploma projects, RTA students develop their simple production lines, design and construct industrial robots, study 3D printing and laser material processing technologies, etc. Most courses are conducted in English and this fact increases the competitiveness of academy graduates in the labor market in the global EU space. The competitiveness of RTA educational programs is also facilitated by the widespread use of online learning and blended learning. Much attention is paid to the digitalization of educational programs and the development of digital competencies of teachers [3]. The academy uses MOODLE educational web platform. The teachers of the academy develop educational materials of a new generation for students of both full-time and part-time forms of education. Among the main aspects RTA training materials development, we note the following: the presence of original photographs, plagiarism ban, the emphasis on the most important points of the lecture, the absence of "noise," the use of various presentation design elements (font, color, sound, animation).

In general, the BELL project contributed to the significant development of distance education in Belarus, primarily to the adult education. Thanks to the project, 6 continuing education centers have been created at regional Belarusian universities. In addition to that, network interaction of Belarusian regional universities aimed at solving issues of continuous education is still developing. As a result of teacher's

internships at European universities-members of the BELL project consortium, modern distance learning technologies have been introduced at regional universities of the Republic of Belarus. University subject alliances have developed and implemented distance learning courses for the population on the following actual topics: English language, Information security, Legal literacy, Entrepreneurship and financial literacy, Energy and resource saving in everyday life.

Each Belarusian university was a member of a subject alliance and was responsible for the development of a certain course. Sukhoi State Technical University of Gomel participated in the development of all distance courses of the BELL project, coordinated the work of the subject alliance on the course "Energy and resource saving in everyday life," as well as the development of the course module on entrepreneurship.

These courses were held for the population of Belarus for free. During 2019–2020, more than 2,600 residents of 5 regions of the country registered for the courses, more than 700 successfully completed training and received certificates from the international BELL project. The European partners took an active part in the monitoring to improve the developed courses. The project experience was analyzed, conclusions were drawn and the proposals for future work were worked out [4].

The practice of implementing online courses of the BELL project revealed a number of problems in conducting distance learning process. The 3 main problems that we solve through the development of BELL online courses, are as follows [5]:

**Problem # 1**: Currently, in Belarus, there is a lack of accessible distance courses for the population, which would be aimed at solving social problems of society, as well as at developing skills and competencies that are in demand for life. The problem of accessibility of educational programs of non-formal additional education was especially evident in the context of the global outbreak of COVID-19;

**Problem #2**: low activity and motivation of students of distance learning courses, which is expressed in a low percentage of successful completion of such courses (**Figure 1**).

According to the QA research after the 1st piloting of the BELL project distance courses, the percent of students who managed to complete the whole course varies from 20% to 40% of all enrolled participants.

#### **Figure 1.** *Number of enrolled/graduated students per HEIs.*

*The Implementation of Best Practices of International Projects as the Way of Enhancement… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.111403*

**Problem #3:** establishing continual interest and demand for training courses among the target groups is another problem, along with the inclusion of educational programs in the framework of additional education. This can also be related to the absence of local stakeholders' involvement. Unfortunately, universities, government bodies, businesses, NGOs, and local communities are not that interested in the lifelong learning processes of the population as they expected to be.

The first problem was solved with the introduction of the section **"Social entrepreneurship"** into the "Entrepreneurship and financial literacy" course. This section was developed on the basis of an USAID Community Connections program internship, which made it possible to introduce the students with the notion of modern trends in entrepreneurial activity. With taking as an example, social enterprise PONYRIDE (Detroit, USA, https://www.ponyride.org/) students take a look at the creative business ideas of social entrepreneurship in the USA, and other developed countries.

The information about the experience of participating in the U.S. programs is given further in this chapter (see Part 3: Section 4).

The directions for solving problems would be also considered by using the example of the course **"Energy saving in everyday life**.**"** The course is about **Energy and Resource Saving in Everyday Life as a Direction of Reducing Utility Bills**. The motto of the course is **"If you want to reduce your utility bills, ask us how to do it!"**.

Thus, the course is aimed at solving actual problems (**Figure 2**).

A summary of the course content is presented (**Table 1**).

At Sukhoi State Technical University of Gomel, just as in, virtually, all Belarusian universities, distance courses are also being introduced. Some specialties have been transferred to distance learning.

At the same time, as the practice of the BELL project has shown, special interactive tools and Internet technologies make it possible to improve distance learning and blended learning courses, especially digital content development resources that are actively used in European universities. As for interactive educational Internet resources, they are actively used in modern education, first of all, to involve students in the educational process, contributing to the solution of problem **#** 2.

So, at The University of Cádiz (Spain), the involved teachers were presented with tools for digitalization and gamification of the educational process. As a result, some of these are being introduced into the practice of working with students of the university, increasing interest in learning.

According to gained experience, the use of the following tools is recommended:


#### **Figure 2.**

*Essential problems covered by the course "Energy saving in everyday life."*


households). Part 4. Non-traditional sources of domestic energy supply (for apartments and private houses).

Part 5. Managing energy saving in everyday life: how to pay less for resources.


#### **Learning outcomes:**


#### **Table 1.**

*Fragment of the training course passport "Household Energy Saving."*

1.**eXe learning**—XHTML and HTML5 editor for e-learning materials. It is a tool for designing, developing and publishing educational and methodological Web materials without the need to learn HTML or complex Web development applications. It allows to create easily navigable web pages including text, images, interactive activities, image galleries or multimedia clips.

*The Implementation of Best Practices of International Projects as the Way of Enhancement… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.111403*

2.**H5P**—a simple online constructor for creating interactive content. Provides the ability to create more than 20 different interactivities: exercises, games, quizzes, videos, presentations, interactive posters, collages, etc.

3.**Hot Potatoes**—a program that provides teachers with the opportunity to independently create interactive tasks and tests for control and self-control. With the help of the program, a teacher can create 5 types of exercises and tests in various disciplines.

4.**Socrative**—an online resource that is designed to organize and use the voting system via any gadgets and computers that can work with questionnaires.

5.**Active Presenter**—program for creating demonstration presentations or training videos. It allows the teacher to record all the actions on the computer screen and edit the recorded video.

6.**Kahoot and Menti** are gaming learning platforms used as educational technology. Educational games, the so-called "Kahoots" are quizzes with several answers to choose from. These resources can be accessed through a web browser and have become popular among teachers in many countries.

By the way, using the Active Presenter program, we have developed short video tutorials in Russian language on the use of educational Internet resources.

The experience of the practical use of these tools at the university has shown that interactive and gaming teaching methods are very effective and can be used both with students and listeners of educational programs for additional adult education.

Another tool for improving educational activities is a practical and studentcentered approach to the design of educational and program documentation.

European universities widely use approaches aimed at individualization of the learning process, focused primarily on the student. These approaches are already used at the stage of designing educational processes and programs, as well as while the preparation of educational and program and educational and methodological documentation.

Analyzing the practice of implementing a student-centered approach at our university, we can also recommend the approaches used at The Open University (UK).

The Open University is a British educational institution founded in 1969. The goal is to provide an opportunity to get an education for people who want to study in a place and time convenient for them. At the moment, more than 150 thousand students study there. It is the largest university in the UK and one of the largest in the world.

The Open University widely practices distance learning. While designing distance courses, the Open University takes an interesting approach to curriculum development and learning design, deeply analyzes the profile of the student in order to get an idea of his needs [6–8].

When it comes to the design of distance courses, it is advisable to analyze the student's profile in order to get an idea of student's needs (**Figure 3**).

Using the example of the English language course "Travelling" (author—Iryna Zaitsava, teacher at LifeLong Learning Institute at Sukhoi State Technical University of Gomel), let us consider the main questions that a teacher should ask himself while designing a course:


Also, it is important to make the student understand effective results of learning:


*The Implementation of Best Practices of International Projects as the Way of Enhancement… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.111403*

**Figure 3.** *Student profile for English language course "Travelling."*

Asking yourself such questions while designing a course, makes it easier for the teacher to decide on the choice of the subject of the material and its level, helps to understand the pace of work and the intensity of the program, the need to include interactive techniques in the course.

Let us take as an example a potential student of the Traveling course. This person is interested in travelling and getting to know the culture of different countries. He is energetic, enthusiastic, likes to get information quickly and is often distracted. In order to attract the attention of such students to the course and not let them get bored, it was decided to diversify the tasks with interactive ones (**Figure 4**).

While developing the module for evaluating learning outcomes, in the course on energy saving, the students were asked not only to complete practical tasks and answer test questions, but also to present the results of the implementation of specific activities that led to a decrease in utility bills.

Along with others, we admit good experience in designing training courses at **Linnaeus University LNU** (Sweden). Currently, more than 35,000 students'study at the university, where distance learning technologies are well developed, active learning methods are widely used.

In order to visualize the presentation of educational materials and explain to students the objectives of learning at LNU, we were shown how the methods of studying and subsequently solving complex or vague problems are applied, by presenting them in detail (**Rich Pictures**), as well as a detailed description of the structure of the system (**System Maps**), which consists of definition, association and ratio of components.

The use of the Rich Pictures methodology at GSTU university made it possible to present the students with an interactive, simple and understandable structure of the curriculum of the distance course "Energy saving in everyday life" By clicking on a specific picture icon, the student goes to the corresponding section of the course (**Figure 5**). Also, the course contains e-quizzes in Kahoot (**Figure 6**).

For example, if students are interested in the topic of saving water, then by clicking on the relevant picture on **Figure 5**, they get to the page with necessary educational materials, including theoretical information, practical recommendations, materials for monitoring and assessing knowledge, as well as a short video lesson on this topic of the distance course, which shows the effectiveness and gives recommendations for the use of aerators (**Figure 7**).

The use of the tools shown above in the Household Energy Saving course increased the rate of students who successfully completed the course to 56.9% (**Table 2**).

Speaking about the development of inclusive additional education in Belarus, ensuring sustainable interest and demand for distance learning courses for the population, it is advisable to involve a wide range of stakeholders in these processes.

For the development of distance learning at universities, the following post-project sustainability ideas were suggested by partners from VSU [2] (**Figure 8**).

Also, we are interested in establishing new contacts and networking with professionals from all over the world.

Among the significant results of the BELL project, we should also pay attention to the fact that for the first time in Belarus it was possible to ensure the functioning of

**Figure 4.** *Kahoot game on Belarus symbols and Mentimeter Questionnaire on travelling.* *The Implementation of Best Practices of International Projects as the Way of Enhancement… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.111403*

**Figure 5.** *Interactive course-curriculum "Energy saving in everyday life."*

the interuniversity network of continuing education (International Learning Network) based on distance learning technologies and Bologna tools for the development of the regional labor market.
