Collecting data from Erasmus+ projects to detect those that have been identified as good practice or success story could be very useful in order to help teachers to define successful projects in a particular field. To compile projects of interest, the Erasmus+ Project Results Platform is available, which has a database with very useful information to locate educational projects that have been funded by the European Union. The advantage of using this tool is that it has a search engine that allows anyone to look up for keywords. Moreover, it permits to define different criteria so as to identify good practices projects that could serve as a reference in order to find useful parameters to improve the teaching process. This chapter presents the main data collected from educational projects that are related to eLearning and related methodologies in the aforementioned platform. It also defines which ones will be selected so as to be able to undertake an adequate analysis that allows the definition of a methodological guide to be carried out.
TopIntroduction
Today's society is changing at a dizzying pace and it is not escaping our knowledge as the increasing use of information and communication technologies (ICT) is booming. This creates a need for people to have the skills to participate effectively in a digital world. Therefore, it implies an increase in the use of digital technologies to improve the teaching-learning process.
The term eLearning refers to training by electronic means, which undoubtedly involves the use of ICT. This fact means that focusing on projects related to the Learning methodology allows not only to analyze the success of this methodology but also on the usefulness of ICT platforms and tools for this type of teaching (García-Peñalvo & Seoane-Pardo, 2015; Gros & García-Peñalvo, 2016; García-Peñalvo, 2020; Crisol-Moya et al., 2020). Therefore, it allows covering all aspects of interest for the analysis of both the use of ICT and teaching methodologies.
One way to analyze educational eLearning projects is to research projects funded by the European Union (EU) through the Erasmus+ Programme (EU, 2020a). These projects are listed in the Erasmus+ Project Results Platform (EU, 2020b), which contains all the projects funded by the Erasmus+ Programme and its predecessor programs in education, youth and sports since 2007.
In the indicated platform, all projects are classified, and it allows selecting those labeled as good practices or success stories. Hence, this database provides a means of gathering the necessary preliminary information required to identify the key factors that make these projects valuable.
Furthermore, this database offers a great opportunity to examine the evolution and scope of Erasmus+ projects related to eLearning or related methodologies in the 2014-2020 cycle up to the present, focusing on those that have been identified as good practices or success stories.
With the preliminary information collected from the projects, it will be possible to carry out an adequate selection of the sample for any study. In the case presented on this chapter, the group of projects of interest are those related to electronic learning that have been classified as good practices or success stories, examining the common variables that make them useful for researching good strategies in education.
In addition, it is important to carry out a good process of screening and selection of samples. There are more than 1000 European educational projects of the Erasmus+ Programme (2014-2020) related to eLearning classified as good practices and / or success stories. Bearing in mind that it is necessary to limit the scope of the study to be able to tackle it successfully, it is convenient to take a sample from that list of projects linked to the term eLearning.
This chapter shows how the study of eLearning projects has been carried out throughout the use of the aforementioned platform, the different necessary stages and the results obtained in the first step with the analysis of the projects, followed by the conclusions.